Finder Slow to Reveal Drive Contents

I'm operating in OS X Leopard 10.5.5/Mac Pro 2GHz/2MB RAM. The finder is very slow to reveal the contents of my hard drive, often taking several seconds to show the contents of any given folder. Any ideas?

How full is your harddrive?

144GB of available space on a 250MB drive.

I have same problem

I have OSX 10.5.5/MacBook Pro 17"/4gig mem and sometimes it takes up to 5 minutes to open a folder in my documents place (i'm in panel view (3rd view button from left) in my finder window). 165gig disc space left.

I clicked on Documents then click on a folder and I get spinning multi-color ball for about 4 minutes then folder contents show up.

kash65 said:

144GB of available space on a 250MB drive.

Click to expand...

Check your Harddrive's "Smart" status in the disk utility. Might indicate the drive is going bad.

try cleaning out your cache wth a app like onyx, or doing a disk repair in apps > utilities > disk utility > first aid then click on repair permissions. should take around 10 mins

Thanks for your help here. After following the suggestion of checking my drives status I found that my drive had major unfixable errors (directory forks and stuff). I backup everything up and my drive failed the next day. I had to send Macbook Pro in for a drive replacement. Thanks for the info thou - since I was able to backup before the failure.