Im fairly new to mac computers and i have a power book g4 and it says that i have used approx. 57.27 gb of the 74 gb that are on there. I cant figure out how i used that much space and i tried getting rid of programs, pictures, videos, anything i could to get some space back..but nothing is working.Im not sure if i deleted things wrong ( i thought that i could just throw the program in the trash to delete them) Was that wrong? Do i now need to reformat my computer and how would i do it because im afraid of messing up my computer it i try to figure it out myself.

please please please help..someone

Assuming you've got precious data on your Mac, I would say you should start by backing up the data. If it's a relatively small amount of data that you need to backup, you can simply burn it on a blank CD/DVD. Or if you have a network, you can back it up on another machine.

Now that you're ready to wipe everything, I would suggest the best thing to do is follow my guide to reinstalling Tiger. Make sure you choose the "Erase+Install" option when installing, and it will automatically reformat your hard drive.
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread54207.html

Hope this helps

Just curious.
Which Mac operating system are you using?
I just wiped my eMac clean. Well, Apple did. But I had a hard time backing up my hard drive (3 times it didn't give acceptable results), so I had to drag everything to my external hard drive.
I didn't get a 'disk image' on the first try and got one on the second and third try, but they were too small to be a full copy.
I was using Disk Utility as suggested by a friend.

Good luck and welcome to Macs!
Dan

eMacs: 700Mhz and 1024Mhz, Gig RAM & OS X3.8 (waiting for Leopard after it has been on the market for a few months)

After moving items to your trash, you have to empty the trash bin before the items will be deleted off of hte drive and space recovered.

Try using Disk Inventory X. Download it from here: http://www.derlien.com/ . It shows a map of your hard-drive with colors for kinds of files. Check it out. You probably have some 1GB movies out there. Compress them with iMovie

just wanted to say thx, i have just relocated, have pc issues on top of it and couldnt find
the "code" per "wipe out" of my hard drive..

for no apparent reason i cant get my pc to find the tcp/ic, found the sql server stuff, however
it wont start either, so i guess its wipe out time,, its all good, been here done that, even tho
i hate to..

just couldnt find the paper i wrote how to do it on,, still packed possibly..
my hat goes off to all you folks who know all this stuff, i find it by trial and error.

thx again!

Debby