Aliens are eating my disk space

[StupidlyHappy]

Hi All,

I am having trouble managing the disk space on my system volume. I have a setup with several partitions (which hasn't worked as well as I had hoped). My system partition is 4 GIG and contains the bulk of the installation that is intended for the system volume.

My customizations include moving the Users folder and the virtual memory to a separate partition (System installed applications and developer tools remain on the System partition). After installing the developer tools I have about 600 Meg free on my harddrive (this seems to be enough given that VM is not taking up space). However, when I start to run multiple applications my System partition gets eaten alive and I generally end up getting a bunch of disk full errors until I restart my machine to reclaim the disk space (just quitting applications recalims some but not all of the space).

MS Office, PowerTerm, and VirtualPC appear to be the worst offenders but I can't find where they are storing temp files so that I can link the temp files to another partition. Does anyone have any help.

I am running OS 10.2.1 on a DP 450 with 512 Meg RAM. This was not a problem in 10.1.

Grins,

SH

 

[genghiscohen]

Easiest step first. Double check to make sure that vm is on another partition. An upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2 switches it back to its default location on the bootup drive/partition.

 

[StupidlyHappy]

genghiscohen,

I am sure that vm is on the other partition.

SH

 

[genghiscohen]

So much for the easy answer.
Another possibility is caches. Check the size of the files in /Library/Caches and /System/Library/Caches right after a restart, and again when you are running multiple applications.