[Muffinman]

I have deleted almost everything that I had on my hard drive. I had about 10 gigs of pictures on there and deleted those...hy hard drive started out, with those images on there, at 19 gigs used with about 6 gigs available. I deleted those images and emptied the trash and still have 6 gigs avaialble. What gives? Any thoughts?

[lothar56]

Can you give specs on your iBook? HD size would be nice for one. Also, what system are you running? I'm not sure what OS X would say about the memory it takes for VM, but that could be an option maybe?

[Tee]

Were the items that you deleted located in your Home directory?
Do you, by chance, have FileVault enabled?

[eeeaa]

How much RAM do you have installed on your machine? If your RAM is low, you are probably eating up space on the hard drive via virtual memory. Do a restart, and see if you have the hard disk space back. You may want to get more RAM installed. Check out RAMSeeker.com for good prices on RAM. The cheapest I've seen is about $90 for 1GB.

Also, where are you looking for your available hard disk space? If you have the Mac OS displaying the available space under the hard drive icon on your desktop, and you are using that to determine the total available space, it will not update after you free up space. Either do a restart or click the hard drive icon and do a <em>Command+I</em> to Get Info on the drive. That will show you the actual available space.

If you are running your machine at 6GB of disk space, you are going to see slowdowns. Less than 15% available hard drive space will do this, as OS X doesn't like not having enough room to breathe. It may be time to invest in an external FireWire drive, and move some of your stuff off your internal hard drive and onto that drive. The other alternative is a new internal hard drive, if you are good at following directions and are careful. You can install it yourself, and get 100GB for under $150. I just installed one myself, and am problem free now. In fact, my machine runs noticeably faster, and I don't have to worry about free disk space. Prior to this, I was like you...trying to move things off my drive every time I wanted to install something new. It's a pain.

[lilford]

Try using ifixit.com for very good manuals on taking apart your computer and adding stuff to it. Great for almost any kind of upgrade that you want to do on your computer. As long as you are good at keeping track of loads of tiny screws, and following directions, you shouldn't have much of a problem taking apart your computer and replacing the hard drive. There are also manuals there to add more memory and everything you could think of doing to your computer. BTW, what model and everything is your ibook? That will help us help you unless you already have everything under control??

[eeeaa]

Originally Posted by Krjat

Try using ifixit.com for very good manuals on taking apart your computer and adding stuff to it. Great for almost any kind of upgrade that you want to do on your computer. As long as you are good at keeping track of loads of tiny screws, and following directions, you shouldn't have much of a problem taking apart your computer and replacing the hard drive. There are also manuals there to add more memory and everything you could think of doing to your computer. BTW, what model and everything is your ibook? That will help us help you unless you already have everything under control??

Regarding the screws...thought this would be a nightmare, but the screw guide that comes with every one of their other guides is perfect. Just tape the screws to it in the right place, and it keeps track of them. Also, you could tape the screws right to the pictures in the guides, so you knew exactly where they went.

[lilford]

Yea, because whenever I think of trying to keep track of all those screws, it gives me nightmares. If you love one little screw, it would "Screw" up your whole prodject, till you find the iensy little screw in Ace hardware or lowes.