Systems Folder?, How to free up memory... Options

[alreed]

hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

[alreed]

OK... some more info coming up....

processor: 1.2 GHz PowerPC G4
memory: 768 MB DDR SDRAM

And the internal hard drive is 27.82 GB apparently. I'm presently using 26.84 (28,816,822,272 bytes), though to be honest, having gone through all my applications, folders etc, I'm only using just over 10GB!

Thanks already for that stuff about scratch disks... I have got microsoft office on this and have been using it quite heavily recently. How do I sort that out then, if that is the problem - access and delete those files??

Cheers,
Alex

Oh, sorry forgot to say it's OSX 10.4.11

....which big cat is that anyway, I get them all confused