Hard Drive Space Severely Reduced

[Falthor]

My 120GB Mac has been steadily losing space on its Hard Drive. I downloaded and uninstalled Microsoft Messenger and twice for FrostWire (due to a "corruption" of sorts in my first go), and my HD space decreased from 96.87 to 91.89 to 77.8 GB. What do I do? How can I fix all of this?

[Satcomer]

It sounds like you swap file is messing up. Download a cache clearing program like Yasu or Onyx and run the routines.

To find the offending files download WhatSize.

[Falthor]

That's not going to help. It adds to the problem. The more I install and the more I uninstall, the lower my HD space gets.

It's now at 77.43, no 77.42 GB.

[eric2006]

Originally Posted by Falthor

That's not going to help. It adds to the problem. The more I install and the more I uninstall, the lower my HD space gets.

It's now at 77.43, no 77.42 GB.

Those programs will help you reclaim freespace if they are caused by an OS malfunction. Maintenance is the more user-friendly version of Onyx, if you prefer that.

[Falthor]

Is there an alternative means without downloading anything? I know it's desperate, but I'll do it regardless; I'll restart the computer from scratch, but how do I do that?

[eric2006]

I think you can fix this without reinstalling, but if you really want to reinstall, you can:

a. Backup everything, install OS X with a "clean install"
b. reinstall OS X with "Archive and install"

[Falthor]

Nope. The problem has been fixed. I'm now at 90.49 GB, a little bit less than what I had, but still good. Thanks for all your help though.

It was all a matter of deleting old cache and rebooting my computer. Jeez, how much of an idiot am I?

But I do have a question. If you just downloaded iWork '08, 100 songs, and a P2P sharing file program, how much should that, on average, take up on your HD?

[eric2006]

iWork '08 is around 3-4 GB, I imagine ('06 is 2 GB). 100 songs would be less than half a gig. P2P program wouldn't take up much space, but they can cause system errors.