HD space depletes when I have Office open...

[RebeccaDisque]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Power PC

I've been having trouble with this for about a week. I'll boot up my computer and have a little over 2 GB on my HD. Then it will start to go down until I get a warning. It went down to 363 MB the other day. I have found that this only happens when I have an Office program open. I thought it was just Word, but it happened when I opened Entourage a few minutes ago.

Any ideas?

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Power PC

I've been having trouble with this for about a week. I'll boot up my computer
and have a little over 2 GB on my HD. Then it will start to go down until I
get a warning. It went down to 363 MB the other day. I have found that this
only happens when I have an Office program open. I thought it was just Word,
but it happened when I opened Entourage a few minutes ago.

Any ideas?

2GB is dangerously little. You should get really worried about HD space when
the free space on your boot drive is less than 20% of the disk capacity. The
OS and all applications begin caching data to the HD and such a small amount
gets used up quickly. Get a larger disk, soon before you start having large
scale data corruption.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Rebecca,

I've been having trouble with this for about a week. I'll boot up my
computer and have a little over 2 GB on my HD. Then it will start to go
down until I get a warning. It went down to 363 MB the other day. I have
found that this only happens when I have an Office program open. I
thought it was just Word, but it happened when I opened Entourage a few
minutes ago.

2GB left is really not enough,
I suspect that your Mac is also short on available RAM. When you open
Office, it needs more RAM than what's available and the System has to
create swap files for virtual memory.
That's what's eating up your available space.
That's also why Apple recommends leaving squite some space unused on the
boot drive.

Corentin