Help me understand virutal memory!

[Miss Elaine]

I am running a bloated Leopard on my iBook G4. Under my activity monitor, my VM size is 38.3 GB. However, I only seem to have about 3 GB available on my HD. This indicates to me that there is 38.3 Gigs free, but I am only able to put 3 Gigs on it. Am I misunderstanding what this virtual memory is? Also, I have looked at the size of all my folders, including applications (at least I think I have), and can only seem to account for about 40GB out of my 80GB HD. I fear that I am missing HD space. Am I?

Thanks in advance for any useful info.

 

[Noels]

Miss_Elaine,

Go to Disk Utility and select your primary hard drive. On the right side, you can select "Partition" and you will see a graphical depiction of your hard drive and the space on it... If it is already partitioned, you can select any partition and it will tell you the information on that partition. From that you should be able to deduce what you have and where it is.

If you're worried about your hard drive, go back to the "First Aid" tab and select Verify Disk," and it will analyze your hard drive and tell you if there is a problem. If there is, you will also get a button to fix the hard drive...

About virtual memory. The OS can select hard drive space and put it aside as a virtual memory - a place where it can save information that you use frequently for fast recall, like a cache. I don't believe it should be using half of your hard drive to do that, though. If it turns out that's the case from looking at Disk Utility, you might want to call Apple and ask them about it.

Noel