My wife is asking me for help with her iBook and I don't know anything
about Macs or OSX. She has a 30GB hard drive which is showing very
little free space, only 48MB. So we moved about 1GB of songs and videos
into the trashcan and then emptied the trash; then we re-launched Disk
Utility. Itstill shows only 48MB of free space. Why isn't that space
being reclaimed after the trash can is emptied? I am fairly certain she
does not have almost 30GB of files on the disk and that the space being
reported is way off the mark. Is there a known problem with OSX on the
iBook mistakenly thinking the disk is almost full?

Thanks
marty

In article <6eydneoNsMqTR7PYnZ2dnUVZ_rWdnZ2d@comcast.com>,
marty <marty@anonymity.tv> wrote:

> My wife is asking me for help with her iBook and I don't know anything
> about Macs or OSX. She has a 30GB hard drive which is showing very
> little free space, only 48MB. So we moved about 1GB of songs and videos
> into the trashcan and then emptied the trash; then we re-launched Disk
> Utility. Itstill shows only 48MB of free space. Why isn't that space
> being reclaimed after the trash can is emptied? I am fairly certain she
> does not have almost 30GB of files on the disk and that the space being
> reported is way off the mark. Is there a known problem with OSX on the
> iBook mistakenly thinking the disk is almost full?
>
> Thanks
> marty

I have a G3 iBook with a mere 10gB of space. OSX builds up so called
swapfiles after a while, they are invisible and the only normal way to
"reset" them is to restart the computer often. Have you tried rebooting
and then checking the free space?

In article <6eydneoNsMqTR7PYnZ2dnUVZ_rWdnZ2d@comcast.com>,
marty <marty@anonymity.tv> wrote:

> My wife is asking me for help with her iBook and I don't know anything
> about Macs or OSX. She has a 30GB hard drive which is showing very
> little free space, only 48MB. So we moved about 1GB of songs and videos
> into the trashcan and then emptied the trash; then we re-launched Disk
> Utility. Itstill shows only 48MB of free space. Why isn't that space
> being reclaimed after the trash can is emptied? I am fairly certain she
> does not have almost 30GB of files on the disk and that the space being
> reported is way off the mark. Is there a known problem with OSX on the
> iBook mistakenly thinking the disk is almost full?
>
> Thanks
> marty

I have a G3 iBook with a mere 10gB of space. OSX builds up so called
swapfiles after a while, they are invisible and the only normal way to
"reset" them is to restart the computer often. Have you tried rebooting
and then checking the free space?