Recently my wife let me know that her Macbook would only work for about five minutes. Now in knowing that her technical knowledge is limited I asked specifically what that meant and she explained that she could visit web pages for a couple minutes and then her browser no longer worked. The computer was still on but no web pages would come up.
After a little troubleshooting I realized the Macbook was out of disk space. She uses Safari primarily so I imagine some temporary cache was filling up and not allowing future web pages to open up. She is running OS X 10.4 so I needed to find out how to clean up the disk a bit. I decided to do two things which included removing GarageBand which she has never used and archiving some of her older music and pictures.
Check Disk Space:
To check disk space on a mac you can open up a terminal window and issue the below command. A terminal window can be opened by opening the Finder window, clicking Application, clicking Utilities, and selecting Terminal from the available options.
- df -kh
Removing GarageBand:
To remove GarageBand all you need to do is open up the Finder window and do a search for GarageBand. In my case about 10 files and/or folders displayed in the results. I simply dragged all of the results in the Finder window to the Trash and then emptied the Trash. Immediately I noticed a gain of about 3.4 GB so I had some room to work now.
Archiving Old Pictures & Music:
Now I needed to connect to a network share at the house to move over the old pictures and music. Again I opened the finder window but this time I clicked on Network. I was able to locate the proper workgroup and computer I needed to connect to. I typed in the username and password to authenticate and then created a folder to drag the data to. The computer I was temporarily moving her data to has a DVD burner so I could burn the music and images on to DVD and provide them to her. Again I just highlighted the folder with all of the old data and this time instead of dragging to the trash I dragged it into the network share folder and things started copying. After the data was done being copied I deleted the data from the laptop and freed up plenty of space.
