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]

If anyone's interested still, I solved it... as a 'super-user'. If anyone else ever has this problem then read this:

I downloaded WhatSize, then...

1. Launched Terminal and typed sudo followed by a space.
2. Ctrl clicked on the freshly installed WhatSize application, and chose Show Package Contents.
3. Opened the Contents/MacOS folder within, and found the WhatSize unix executable file.
4. Dragged that file onto the Terminal window, and from within that window, pressed enter.
5. Entered admin password.

This way I could open WhatSize as usual, but with superuser privileges and could read every directory on the hard drive I asked it to measure.

WhatSize is freeware for up to 20GB of memory b4 you have to pay for a small license fee - so its good to know where to look - for me it was the Systems folder. My problem was 8GB of Trashes under Volumes in there. Because I'd been running Cubase through my external drive, the System had somehow still kept the trashes on the internal drive...

Thanks to everyone for all the advice though!