[kill bill]

How much free space should I have on my powerbook so that applications run smoothly. The hard drive holds 74.41 gigabytes, and at present I have about 3.08 gigabytes of free space left. Is this healthy for my system or should I cut some things back (mainly music).

[mduell]

The more space you have available, the faster the disk performance and the easier it is for the OS to find contiguous space (seeks kill read/write performance). I recommend 10-20% free, but I'm sure others will disagree (some will say 1%, some will say 50%).

[gangaspeed]

IMO That is not enough, I would move things over to an EXT HD or do a HD upgrade internally.

[Cold Warrior]

to the OP: your free space is definitely too low.

[kill bill]

how much space should I shoot for?

(btw, I'm a media whore. my 500gb ext hd has 7.75gb left)

[amazing]

Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Go to the second tab on the bottom that says "System Memory." How much VM (virtual memory) are you showing? Mine currently says 7.47 GB.

So, no, you don't have enough HD empty space. You're probably seeing a lot of SPUD (spinning beach-ball of Death) when you try to switch between applications, etc. Or, maybe, you're just used to the slow system? Any system instability?

In any case, you should have at least 10% free, and 10 GB would be what I'd say is the minimum.

[kill bill]

ok, I got it down to 13.34gb and performance is up. Thanks guys