[P1] filled up ibook?

[Mike Wallinga]

I don't know if this will help you much, but if you are comfortable 
using the Terminal, this is one thing you can check:

Mac OS X is pretty good at allocating virtual memory on-the-fly as 
needed - it just creates another swap file on the hard disk whenever 
it's getting low.  But, it isn't very good at deleting swap files when 
they're not needed any more.  You can check how many swap files are on 
the disk by doing on of these two commands at the terminal:

ls /var/vm/
ls -l /var/vm

(The second command will give you the same information as the first, 
but with a little more detail, including the size of each swap file.)

If you've got too many of these eating up disk space you should be 
pretty safe deleting them.  Here is the  Terminal command that will do 
this:

sudo rm /var/vm/swapfileX (where X is the number of the swapfile you 
want to delete)
or
sudo rm /var/vm/swapfile* will wipe them all out at once.

I just did this to my iBook as I was typing this email - I had four 
swap files taking up about half a gig of space total.  My iBook has 640 
MB of RAM; if the teacher's iBook has less RAM, it could very well have 
several more swap files.

Anyway, this may or may not be an answer to your question, but it's 
something you could try.  Hope this helps a little bit!

  - Mike Wallinga

On Jan 5, 2004, at 11:56 AM, Don Hinkle wrote:
> I was just visiting the local K-8 school, where they have a large 
> computer lab filled with iMacs and other newer Macs, including a 
> double-chipped G5.
> Anyway, the teacher's iBook has a 10G HD but with nothing on it but 
> apps, (i.e., no big video or photo files) seems almost full up.
> It's running 10.2.6 (I think).
> Seems as if I read somewhere about some anomoly in the OS causing it 
> to look full when it's not really.
> ?
> thanks,
>
> donald henry hinkle