Mac OS X geekery ahead: A few handy utilities to the rescue
My computer’s been grinding lately, pausing, unhappy in general. I believe it has something to do with a lack of disk space, some bloated swap file, having lots of apps open, and refreshing caches a boatload.
It’s hard to find out where space is being used in Mac OS X, so this little app called WhatSize is a superfriend—ordering a column view of everythings sorted with file and directory sizes listed.
What are swap files? I think they’re temporary memory. So to force the system to clean things up, I’ve used MacJanitor. With this, I reclaimed over a gig. ( offending hidden files were located at /computer/var/vm/swapfile0-4, don’t delete these though, this app will do it for you )
I was able to archive some projects and photos to clear up a good 15% of hard drive space for the hungry UNIX underpinnings.
Still think there’s something fishy about disk usage? There’s some freeware out there to help you find duplicate files.
Yes, I did vote today, that’s another story, but now, I have to get back to work, and this machine is much happier.