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...

[lepetitmartien]

I think som exploration of you hard drive should be done. Search for heavy invisible files (there's the options, anything bigger than 1GB, invisible).

Applejack as OnyX will only free space that can be freed, by deleting cache files for example, these will be recreated at the next start up to accelerate things.

Maybe you could rebuild the spotlight database too (takes time to rebuild you're warned) but first things first, you should empty you drive of your files FIRST (I insist). Even if OS X is good at managing heavy loaded drives, you need to make free estate first to help clear things a little without risking something bad. Plus all the optimizations routines there's in OS X won't work if there's no free space to do them.

Now, did I say that drives were cheap?