Need a little help with my ibook HDD

Ok, so I clicked on my Macintosh HD, and it said I only had 4gb left. Last time I checked I had like 11. I downloaded Disc Inventory X and this is what it looked like:

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e25/munchph/***.jpg

What is that windowsserver_last.log, and why is it taking up 6.4 gb of space? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

It's a log file that's run rampant.

Make a back up of your important files, then run this script in Terminal:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Exactly as you see it. It will take a long time to complete.

surfwax95 said:

It's a log file that's run rampant.

Make a back up of your important files, then run this script in Terminal:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Exactly as you see it. It will take a long time to complete.

Click to expand...

Ok, will do. But what's Terminal?

Also, how can I prevent this from happening again?

Terminal (Applications > Utilities) is the program that connects you to the underlying UNIX system via command line. Nerd stuff.

Open it and type in that bolded command exactly as you see it. That command runs 3 scripts that will clean your system of bad log files, like this one.

This is usually caused by an app/peripheral that's writing too many errors to this log file. Once you have that first script ran and back to the prompt, run this script and copy/paste the results here:

tail -f /var/log/windowserver.log

Just copy/paste that script into your Terminal window.

Can't he just run OnyX's daily weekly and monthly maintenance scripts ?

Onyx just runs those scripts that I mentioned...

But, yea, he could download a third party app that could do it.

Thanks so much for your help everyone. I'm going to run the script later tonight. First I have to backup everything. Is there a chance that this might delete some data?

Running the scripts shouldn't be a problem. I've never had any adverse effects with that, but it's always a good idea to keep your data backed up. :doctor: