Daughter needs help

[RHPConsult]

My daughter uses her G-4 Igloo primarily for iPhoto work.

When I handed the Mac to her a year or so ao, its 80 (mol) gig HD was partitioned

Her principal working partition is 30 gigs. She's running Tiger.

She is noticing that she has >1 gig of available space remaining and is hoping to complete a project today. It is being seriously interfered with by limited space available. It looks to her, however, that she only has only 4 gigs of "actual" photos (as I noted, those are her principal accumulation of files)

She uses Onyx to keep caches clean (she tells me) - she's 60 miles away so I'm not looking over her shoulder.

I've heard that temp/scratch/whatever files can proliferate with abandon. Possibly, especially so with photos? How does one find and such offenders, if such there are?

Then, what does she do to clean 'em up/out? What cautions should be observed?

Signed,

Clueless (partially) in California

[sandbox]

Clean Up Your Mac's Hard Drive

http://macs.about.com/cs/hardware/a/clean_drive.htm

[FLASH1296]

If the "free space" is fragmented it may not function as fgree space.
More importantly, a Mac needs to have at least 10% free space to function properly.
20% is recommended.

Use xSlimmer to free up GIG's of wasted space - due to old PPC code in "universal" instrallations and foreign languages in software.
Usually xSlimmer frees up at least a Gig or two.

Also, use "WhatSize 4.1" to view and delete the amazing amount of space wastedon things like swap files.
"Omni Disk Sweeper" is a good alternative.

[RHPConsult]

Deciding that she could dispose of GarageBand and iDVD (via AppZapper . . . Here in case anyone's interested) which I had had forgotten was on the Igloo when she "inherited" it – well, that did the trick . . . at least for this afternoon.

Thanks, SB.

[sandbox]

I guess that's a way to go RHP, since the Mac is project specific. One could theoretically remove all apps not associated to the tasks.
I would suspect though, that adding a FW drive for $50 would give you better value in the long run.
If  I was to just open finder, enter garageband, select all 70 items and hit delete, I could eliminate all things relevant to the application without the extra cost of a new program. I don't think a extra application is needed. But that's just me....

[krissel]

That's the same thing my sister did when she was getting messages that her disk was nearly full. I told her to dump iDVD, GarageBand and the World Book Encyclopedia. She freed up several Gs that way.

She now has an external drive to store extra stuff and keep the main drive more open so the system can breathe.

[RHPConsult]

The problem is getting the project done by tomorrow, when I won't see her until Tuesday with the OWC Mercury Elite HD I'm bestowing on her then.

The plan is to back up al her files, reformat the drive with no partitions (which her year of experience appears now to have demonstrated have far less utility for her usage pattern than I thought initially would be the case)

What I was hoping to help her with this weekend (at a distance) was finding space to get her project completed by other than trashing apps.

Thanks for the other recommendations, Flash. Never heard of them before this.

Had I not been out of state this past week I possibly could have gotten started on this problem earlier.

[Xairbusdriver]

She may also have "inherited" a lot of mp3s, and other iTunes stuff. Audio files take up as much space as many images. Just make sure that when she deletes any music that it removes the files from the drive not just removes them from a 'folder' in iTunes. Probably best to search and delete from the base list rather than any 'groups' that may have been created. Is that confusing enough?!