OSX crashed then gave me 600mb of HD space?

aluminum · #1 October 7th, 2003, 09:31 PM

The finder on my TiBook locked up. I had to force quit it but couldn't get it to terminate. So, I logged out. When I tried to log back in, it would hang, so I rebooted.

My computer then sat for about 15 mintues in the start up screen (the spinning daisy) and then rebooted itself, then appeared to be fine.

The only difference is that I now have an extra 600mb of HD space.

It doesn't appear to have deleted anything important. I am curious as to what it did delete, though. Any theories?

edX · #2 October 7th, 2003, 10:08 PM

probably your swap files and caches. stuff you probably should be keeping cleared on a regular basis anyway, especially if your drive is crowded/near capacity. 15% free space to run os x is what is recommended.

aluminum · #3 October 8th, 2003, 09:22 PM

so...how does one keep swap files and caches cleared on a regular basis?

edX · #4 October 8th, 2003, 09:48 PM

i use Maintain Your Mac . it's freeware and works fine. you might also try searching your drive for 'swap', as sometimes multiple swap files get created and these extras may need to be removed manually i think.

maintain comes with pretty good instructions as to what each function does, so you should be able to figure it out easily.

DeltaMac · #5 October 9th, 2003, 11:55 AM

How much memory is installed in your TiBook? If less than 512 MB, then adding more will help ease creation of multiple swap files (there will be fewer, or only one.) Maintain1 is fine, also OnyX does much the same thing, and works well for me.

arri · #6 October 10th, 2003, 08:02 PM

my experience:

i usually try to have at least 1Gb free disk space on the system partition at startup.
With swap files building up over time, gathering bullshit on the desktop and so on, this will eventually get less and less and less.. i usually reboot at a certain point (when i go to the mens room or something).

Also important; i have multiple partitions. For apps that make havy use of scratch disks; make sure to assign those to the other partition(s), so that the system-disk is not filled with video-render/-capture files or Photoshop scratch stuff..

anecdote;
at work a college wanted to send me a file over the lan. She didn't tell it was 1.5 Gb large.. I told her to put in my DropBox.
So at one point the system locked up. i had to reboot. The system disk was jammed...

and extra memory definateley also helps to reduce the use of swapfiles, and thus speed up your compu.

Arden · #7 October 10th, 2003, 10:15 PM

Wow, what did she send you?