Comatose Mac Mini

[J. Ferron]

I’ve been using a Mac Mini for about two years with OS 10.5.8. At first it was great (much better than my old PC). But as my hard disk fills up gradually (right now I’ve got 3.7 gigs available), its performance suffers - which I’m prepared to accept to some extent.

But it gets ridiculous when I’m suddenly called away from the Mac for say an hour leaving the online connection on, and a dozen sites open. This morning I had to watch the farking pinwheel for over 15 minutes before it finally got going again. Why is this, and is there something I can do about it?

[mmkerc]

The Mac using the hard drive as virtual memory, if you free up some space ( >10%) you should not have the problem

[Solitare]

If you have a lot of music / videos / iTunes on it, you can get an external hard drive to store that data on to free up the internal hard drive space.

[legaltocarry]

You may also want to max out the ram if it's not already and while you're in there add a larger hard drive. Icons on the desktop eat up ram also so consolidate them into one folder named something like "current desktop docs". One last thing, if you attempt to burn a dvd of 4 gigs or so and you don't have 2-3 times that amount of space on the HD you may crash the entire system because it creates a temp file as big as the file you are burning. The best thing you can do is to get a significant number of files off that HD possibly onto an external drive or get the bigger HD. You are really asking for a system wide crash with it so full.