Computer Black Belts, I seek your wisdom.

[joe7987]

So my computer has been screwy today. I had several GB of space left.. and have had that much left for quite some time. I wake up this morning, hop on my computer.. go to do something and I get an error message telling me that my hard drive space is low and that I should clear it up so that it doesn't affect performance.

I go to check the space... and I have a whopping 20MB left. Yes... MB. Wtf happened here? I start looking for a solution, and it shoots up to 100MB... then down to 80 somethin MB and keeps fluctuating.

I found a few files that were decently large in size that I was able to delete and free up some space.. but I shouldn't have had to free up space in the first place. The remaining space seems to have stabilized but it's still lower than it should be considering how much I had last night and how much I deleted today. Anybody have a clue what's going on?

I'm running mac OS X, but windows guys are welcome to answer. Most issues I've run into on mac/pc seem to parallel each other in stimulus and solution and a PC guy's solution might help me solve my problem as well.

A little background info.. This computer is about 5 years old. Started out with 1 GB RAM, but has been upgraded to 2 (I know, it's a beast now... lol /sarcasm). It has been running absolutely fine up until this morning. I did not add, delete, or modify anything out of the ordinary.... no downloads in a while, etc...

Thanks in advance.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

You have a single file or group of files that are fluctuating in size. It could be Virtual Memory going nuts.

Check the Volumes folder, there might a clue in there. Also check your log files at /private/var/log/asl/ and see if you have any HUGE files in there.

 

[joe7987]

In Volumes I only have my HD, external HD, and CD in disk drive.

Something I read was to check the system log and see if it was looking bloated. It said it should never approach a GB. Mines at about 1.2GB... and I see a LOT of redundant error messages concerning WoW. Could this be a problem? They're all on Feb 7 and keep repeating:

"Feb 7 18:30:03 Macintosh-9 [0x0-0x3b03b].com.blizzard.worldofwarcraft[489]: World of Warcraft(489,0xb136e000) malloc: *** error for object 0x23d88e90: Non-aligned pointer being freed (2)
Feb 7 18:30:03 Macintosh-9 [0x0-0x3b03b].com.blizzard.worldofwarcraft[489]: *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug"

This happens several times a second on Feb 7.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

check the WoW folder and see if the size is about right.

 

[joe7987]

All of my WoW files are on an external hard drive. Is there a way for me to clear out the log (safely) to reduce the size of it?

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I just delete my logs, I'm not too sure with OS X.

 

[joe7987]

Well, I just cleared up 10GB by deleting my old logs. Nice having that disk space back.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I love having 3TB of HD space

 

[joe7987]

^^Yea.. I hate you. lol. I have 16GB free now. lol.

The plus side of this issue is it made me look at my activity monitor and I found out that Belkin (the router company) was hogging my RAM. I bought a belkin router a while ago.... it broke after a couple of days so I returned it and got a netgear (and always will from now on) and uninstalled the belkin software. Turns out even when I uninstall it, it doesn't uninstall itself completely. In fact, it's still running, almost a year later and was one of the biggest RAM hogs I had running at the moment. Took care of that issue.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I always use Cisco/Linksys if I can, if it's not available Netgear is next, they've definitely turned their image around, 5-8 years ago I wouldn't have touched them with a 10 foot pole.

 

[joe7987]

I've never used Cisco, but I used to use Linksys. I was ALWAYS resetting my router with Linksys trying to get the damn thing to work again. Probably a few times a week I'd have to reset it. I can't tell you the last time I reset my netgear.

 

[JohnS.]

I've had very bad experiences with Belkin. A router went to s**t in less than a year, another router kept losing connection before a year, I've used my friend's Belkin wireless USB thing and it sucked donkey nuts.

Cisco is the way to go! Linksys is Cisco.

 

[joe7987]

Hmm, another Linksys lover. I've never had luck with them. Maybe the models I'm buying are just too cheap or something. lol.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I've had my Linsys WRT54G for, god, I don't know how many years now.

 

[Matt.]

WRT54G for the win! Best router for everything! I seriously think its the best console gaming router they've ever made. I had a brand new linksys, paid over $100 for it, I traded it to my friend for the wrt54g.

Joe you prob just had a config problem causing the issue.

 

[253eg]

Had the WRT54G as well. Loved that lil f**ker. But, I upgraded to the e2000(or downgraded, depends how you look at it). Have only used Linksys/Cisco

 

[JiuJitsu_greg]

joe there is a program called appzapper out there. You might grab it. It's like 10 bucks. What it does is it is actually an uninstaller. When you throw the application in the trash can to delete it it doesn't get rid of everything that is associated with the application. With app zapper it does that so you don't have stuff laying around like in your belkin situation.

http://appzapper.com/

 

[joe7987]

Downloaded. Thanks Greg!