no hard drive room anymore?

I recieved my white macbook in november of 2006. It has been great up until recently where everything seems to be going wrong.
I have no hard drive room anymore, it says "Zero KB" and because of this i cannot save any word documents, recieve e-mails, upload pictures, or even get onto itunes. I have bought a external hardrive and was told how to use it. Such as to drag documents and stuff like that to it, but to avoid applications, photos, and songs. But this pretty much did absolutely nothing to help my hardrive, as it maybe added 100 MB which would be used up instantly.
Also my battery went through something really weird where it wouldn't work without being plugged in and then after a few days it recuperated itself and works. but it never shows how much battery is left.


Could someone please help me with this. I wanna know, how should i handle what is going wrong. Is there still hope in my computer or would getting a new one be better. PLEASE HELP ME!

For the HD, are you sure you didn't just copy files to the external? If you did this, you will have copies of the files on both your internal and external drives. Thus, you would have saved no space. If, when "moving" your files, you cursor included a green plus sign, you have simply copied the files.

You may have a dying battery. If you open up System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/), what does it say for "Health Information" under Power?

Until you free up your hard drive you will keep having problems. Do you have your original hard drive. They were only 60 or 80 gigs. I would 1) buy a new hard drive if its the original, buy snow leopard, save everything you want saved to a backup drive, then install new (bigger) hard drive and snow leopard. Or 2) Save important files and pictures, etc ( things you can't get elsewhere) do a clean install on your current hard drive. I have a 2006 macbook also with snow leopard and it still runs great.

As a simple solution, as vansmith said, when you drag and drop files from the MacBook drive to the external drive, it leaves the originals on the MacBook drive. These will need to be deleted, otherwise you have not really achieved anything.

I would recommend finding a particular type of file that you don't necessarily need access to at any given moment, for me those are music files. I have an 80GB MacBook HDD, but almost 60GB of audio files. This prevents me from having all of that on the MacBook at once, so I have it on a portable external HDD. iTunes accesses it when I plug in that drive to my computer.This frees up huge amounts of space. The same can be done with pictures and video files etc.

Obviously this isn't good for everyone. I don't mind not having access to all my files at any given time unless the external drives are plugged in, many people might. As southchatham mentions, the only other solution is to replace your MacBook's internal drive with a larger one. For example I've got a 320GB on its way to replace my MacBook's original 80GB drive.

Hope that helps!

David

Something is wrong.

I have had my macbook for 2 years now and something is way wrong. It has Zero KB. So now i cant open any app except safari and I can't delete anything to free up space. also it makes random "clinking" noises. Help me because something is wrong with it.

That sounds like the hard drive is dying especially the clicking. Is this a Macbook? What are the basic specs?

Do you have your OSX DVD that came with the Macbook? If so, boot with the DVD in the machine and hold down the D key right after the startup sound. Run the Apple Hardware Test. See what it finds.

NOTE: Merged crossposts