Are you running out of space on your hard drive?

The amount of free space you need can vary 
depending on how much RAM memory your computer 
has.
Look under your Apple Menu -> "About This Mac". 
You will see the amount of memory shown there.

As a rough calculation to find how much hard disk 
space you need (in GB), double the above figure 
for memory, and add 2.
Nearly all computers now will show the memory in 
Gigabytes (GB). If your computer is old, you may 
see the number quoted as Megabytes (MB). In that 
case, divide by 1000 to convert the number into 
GB.

For example - my current computer has 4GB RAM 
installed. So I should have a minimum of 10GB 
hard drive space on my startup disk.

If the hard drive space is a problem, you can 
often reclaim large amounts of space by disabling 
"Spotlight" on your computer, and deleting the 
Spotlight database files from your hard drive. 
These files are hidden, and after years of use 
they can occupy huge amounts of disk space. Of 
course, the down side of disabling spotlight is 
that you lose the indexes which enable your 
computer to speedily search all the files on your 
computer.

You can disable Spotlight by entering commands in 
the Terminal program (google "Disable Spotlight" 
for instructions). If you find that challenging, 
you may consider buying software called 
"Spotless". It comes in separate versions for OS 
10.5 and 10.6, so your best path would be to buy 
the 10.5 version first, then pay the upgrade 
price for the 10.6 version.

hth.. AD

==========================================
At 7:18 PM +0200 15/4/13, t muraoka wrote:
>Hello everybody,
>
>I wonder if any of you could help me.
>
>When I start working on a NW file, a 
>multi-coloured sunflower-like thing appears and 
>starts revolving, which seems to last for ages. 
>So long as it¹s turning round, I can¹t work on 
>the file. Does anyone know what this is and how 
>can I stop this or get rid of this sunflower?
>It¹s a real nuisance.
>
>Cheers,
>Takamitsu