[loonylovegood7]

I've had a white macbook for just over a year now.

For the last few months, it seems to be eating its own memory. Everyday it will tell me I have absolutely no memory and applications will shut down or refuse to open. I will delete about 7 albums of music per day and it will only free up a couple of MB or sometimes nothing. Whatever it frees up will disappear within half an hour.

Out of my 111GB capacity, I have only visibly used 21GB of music (everything else has gone on my external hard drive) at the rate I am having to delete things though - I am going to end up with nothing on my computer and no memory

Please help!

[ghporter]

Welcome to our forums!

Now for a few important points. First, "memory" almost always refers to "RAM" or "random access memory." This is the solid-state hardware that the computer uses to handle information quickly-it is "volatile" (it goes away when power is removed), and is typically limited in capacity to around 8GB.

A "hard drive" is NONvolatile (it retains its contents even after power is removed), and can be enormous, with current drives offering up to 2 TERRAbytes of storage.

Your MacBook problem appears to be one of HARD DRIVE storage. If you started out with 111GB, you can expect around 10-15GB of that to be eaten up by the OS. Your roughly 21GB of music would put used space at a maximum of about 36GB. But what apps do you have installed? That can be a big thing. Apps take up disk space, sometimes a whole lot of it. Your documents and files could be large as well. And OS X creates logs for a number of operations as well, and these logs may not be purged when no longer needed. There's a lot that could be eating up your hard drive's space. Take a look at things other than music on your drive-you may have tons of gunk you don't need to keep.

[reader50]

You have a logging or other process using up your disk space. The first step is to find where all that space is being used, and delete most of the useless files. That will give you breathing room to figure out what is generating the unneeded files.

Install OmniDiskSweeper which is free, and only 6.3 MB. You may need to run it from the root account in order to see into all the HD's directories. It sorts based on size, so it should find your space-hogging files easily.