Memory or HD update

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kenz1625

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Hi. This might seem like a rather juvenile question to people who completely understand computers, but I am not one of those people and I needed the help of people who are.

I have a MacBook that is almost five years old and it is both really slow and constantly telling me I don't have enough room on my computer for updates and downloads, etc.

My question is, would this be a problem with low memory or low hard drive space?

I am willing to update whichever needs to be updated in order to help my computer work better. I don't have that much taking up room on my computer currently so I am not exactly sure what the problem is.

Help Please! Thanks!
 
Have you ever run any software cleaning maintenance before? Download either Yasu or onyx and run all the cache cleaning routines. Let the program reboot you Mac when finishing cleaning. Upon that reboot immeadiatly manually reboot again to completely rebuild your Mac's startup/shutdown system cache.

Now if you want to replace that drive take a look at an install video.
 
If there is not enough space, the first problem is the space. Mac OS X runs smoother when you have always at least 15 % of your hard drive space free (100 GB = 15 GB free, 200 GB = 30 GB free etc).
If there are files on your drive you don't need always, get them on an external hard drive to free space. Or get a bigger drive...

More RAM makes Mac OS X faster as well. How much RAM do you have now, which Mac OS X are you running, and how much empty space do you have?
 
I am on operating system 10.5.8.

When I go to activity monitor and click on system memory it says I have 62.16 MB of free space.

When I click on my hard drive it says I have 3.64 GB available.

I hope this answers your question.
 
Also, what kind of things do you recommend I move to an external hard drive? and once I move them, do I then delete them from my computer?
 
kenz1625 said:
I am on operating system 10.5.8.

When I go to activity monitor and click on system memory it says I have 62.16 MB of free space.

When I click on my hard drive it says I have 3.64 GB available.

I hope this answers your question.
Click to expand...

Yep you'll definitely need more RAM and hard drive space. OS X likes to use a lot of virtual RAM and it will range in size by gigabytes.

How much RAM is free when you first start up your computer?

What is the speed of your processor?

kenz1625 said:
Also, what kind of things do you recommend I move to an external hard drive? and once I move them, do I then delete them from my computer?
Click to expand...

Keep your programs and system files on your main hard drive. Photos, Movies, Documents, Music, etc. should go onto your external drive. You can then tell iMovie, iPhoto and iTunes to look for those libraries on your external drive.

Once you have made sure that the files have been successfully copied over and are functioning fine. You can then delete the original files off of your main drive.

How much RAM does your computer have?
 
Seems to me you're asking for a small guide to what the difference is.

Think of memory (or RAM) as a desk and hard drive (or hard disk) as a closet. The more memory you have, the more stuff your computer will be able to keep close and handy to pull up quickly. The bigger your hard drive, the more stuff you can have in it, but it takes a bit longer to fetch. While you use files, your computer will temporarily copy them from your HD to your memory so it can work faster.


If you can't download upgrades anymore you need a bigger hard drive, the easiest way by far would be to buy an external hard drive, move your pictures, music and/or movies to that and delete them from your internal HD.

To find how much HD space you have, mark the picture of your HD on your desktop, hold cmd and press i. You should see among other things a noted Capacity and Available space.
To find how much Memory you have, press the Apple symbol in the top left corner of your screen, and select About This Mac.
 
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