Need more memory- What should I do?

Hello, first of all I hope this is the right place to post this. I don't know much about computers and I am hoping for some guidance.

Last month I got my first Mac, a 20" iMac with 2 GB memory and 750 GB hard drive. I am happy with it but I am having a problem.

I have a large document that I am working on in Word. The document has many links to data I have in an Excel file. It appears that these links take up a lot of memory, because I have reached the point where when I try to save the document I get an error message saying the hard drive is full. The Word document is 580 KB and the Excel document is 5.5 MB. The Word document will need to get much bigger before I am through with it.

How can I continue to work on these documents? Can I buy an external hard drive and work on them through that drive? And if so what size should I get?

Thank you for any help! I really need to get this resolved.

ETA: This is the error message I am getting:
The disk is full trying to write to “Macintosh HD”. Free some space on this drive, or save the document to another disk. Try one or more of the following: *Close any unneeded documents, programs, and windows. *Save the document on another disk.

have you emtied your trash? how have you used up a 750 gig hd!!

I've seen this error before... and rest assured, it IS an error... There is no way you have used up 750gb (unless you have a MASSIVE amount of Movies AND Music)...

Get Onyx, and do all the maintenance scripts, cleaning scripts etc... then restart.. That will probably do the trick.

Thanks for your reply. I did empty the trash.

Okay, I am not sure but it seems impossible for me to have used up the hard drive. I have the iStat widget and it says that I currently have on the Macintosh HD 15.57 GB used hard drive and 682.7 GB Free. (Um, I am assuming that U stands for used and F stands for free.)

So maybe the error message I am getting is referring to RAM rather than the HD?

Btw, I do have all applications closed except for Word and Excel when I am working on my documents (as well as Finder and Dashboard which don't seem to close).

Sorry if my terminology is wrong, like i said I don't know much about computers!

katie123 said:

Thanks for your reply. I did empty the trash.

Okay, I am not sure but it seems impossible for me to have used up the hard drive. I have the iStat widget and it says that I currently have on the Macintosh HD 15.57 GB used hard drive and 682.7 GB Free. (Um, I am assuming that U stands for used and F stands for free.)

So maybe the error message I am getting is referring to RAM rather than the HD?

Btw, I do have all applications closed except for Word and Excel when I am working on my documents (as well as Finder and Dashboard which don't seem to close).

Sorry if my terminology is wrong, like i said I don't know much about computers!

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Hi,
I am not sure if this is the correct answer, it might be your ram is not compatible. Did you acquire your iMac as brand new? or second hand? I have used iMac with 2 Gig ram with 100mb to 200mb graphic files and the iMac handles it adequately. I use Kingston ram. And also the 20" iMac only supports a maximum 2 gig ram as far as I know.

It should be able to handle word and excel file well. Sorry if I could not pinpoint a more accurate solution.

Hello, this may help you out.

Goodluck.

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DiskFullError.html

Reel1 said:

Hello, this may help you out.

Goodluck.

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DiskFullError.html

Click to expand...

Sure sounds like it.

That's one heck of a bug.

Thanks for the suggestions. I downloaded Onyx and also the disk full error fix. Hopefully they will work!