demortey said:
my question about that...is osx really that much of a pig on swap files? my memory usage is rarely 100%, right now its at 37%. (i think that is the most logical reason for the disk space to be going up and down so much).
is there a way to find out what exactly is draining so much of the cpu?
i don't really mind the applications folder not being visible, i can still get things in finder and see the contents in terminal. i can deal with it, though i would like it to be proper.
The Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder will show you a list of processes and how much CPU/memory they are consuming. It also shows graphs of disk/memory/network usage. As for the folder not showing the icons my laptop does that sometimes, but I am using OS X 10.3.9. Pressing the back button and then reopening the Applications folder has always fixed it.
Have you tried verifying the startup disk in Disk Utility? You can do that in OS X 10.4.8 without restarting to the startup CD, but for repairs you will have to reboot from the CD.
Also, this may help speed up your system:
Open Terminal (Applications:Utilities) and type the following:
sudo periodic daily
then press Return. You'll need to enter your administrator password. The command won't give any feedback as it is working but rest assurred it is. When it is finished, run the same command again except type
sudo periodic weekly. When that is finished, run the command again but this time type
sudo periodic monthly.
What those commands do is execute the various underlying UNIX maintenance scripts. OS X schedules these to run by default in the middle of the night, thus on laptops they rarely get to execute. The scripts, particularly the weekly script, can take several minutes if they have not been executed in some time.