Memory in Hard Drive Slowly Decreasing

cyprus mac man

cyprus mac man

Expert Macintosh...er
I have a PowerBook G4 15 inch 1.5 GHz PPC processor. Recently My hard drive began it fill up. One night I had 5 GB of free space. The next morning I had 500 MB of free space. No one had used the computer and it was not connected to the internet. Then, that morning, every second the space would decrease by 50 MB. Eventually it said that there was no free space left. I ran Norton Anti-Virus and nothing showed up. I shut down the computer and rebooted it and then it read that there was 700 MB of free space. Now after deleting stuff, there is 2.68 GB of free space.

My hard drive capacity is 74.41 GB. It says that 71.72 GB are used, but after looking at all the folders they only add up to approximately 55 GB. What can I do?

P.S. i submitted this into the Free Tech Support too...
 
this sounds like a VM leak of some kind.

OS X uses virtual memory in a very dynamic way, and normally uses around 10-15% of the harddrive to do so. (Virtual Memory is when the harddrive is used to extend what the RAM does). this can of course start creating very large VM files, which get erased upon reboot (explaining the dramatic fluxuations when you reboot). usually, VM doesn't eat up space that fast.

open Activity Monitor, found in Applications>Utilities, and look in the System Memory tab. what size is the VM?

also, at this stage, sort the running processes by memory, to see what's using a lot of it, and consequently what could be causing the problems.
 
The VM size is 7.04 GB, but fluctuates up to about 7.14 GB. I have had problems with RAM. I have 512 MB installed, but the computer only reads 256 MB. I am going to get this problem fixed eventually.

How can I fix this leak?
 
hey, i used OnyX and it cleared a lot of space. Thanks, it worked great. For future reference, would it help if I got my RAM fixed so I would have 512 MB?
 
Yes, not really for disk space, it will only help a little. Bit you machine will be like a gazillion times faster.
 
512 is the minimum that you'd want for OS X 10.4. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the requirement for 10.5. More memory would be better, but it's expensive, especially with laptops. I don't think that'd help your problem too much, but it would decrease the VM size.
 
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