well ihave a powerbook g4 with 55.89gb memory and my computer says i have used 55.89gb i have deleted all files and some of my apps and my memory is the same i ven bought another hard drive and i still can't open illustrator or photoshop it opens and closes right back and says not enough memory how can i free up more memory and why with the other harddrive i cant open my apps. 2nd question why when i insert a dvd it doesnt show on desktop or play and can't find it in disc utility. HELP me Please I am a graphic designer but without my apps opening i cant work

I'm a little bit confused here. You see, the term "memory" in the IT context actually refers to the random access memory that your computer uses to temporarily store bits of data. "Disk space" seems to be what you've filled up.

First, if Illustrator gave the "not enough memory" error, buying a new hard disk is NOT the right solution. A much better one would be to add more RAM to your PowerBook.

What was probably happening was Illustrator never had enough memory to begin with. While you still had disk space, it used a bit of it as a sort of replacement for RAM. When you used this space up, Illustrator no longer had anywhere to create this "hard drive RAM" (more commonly referred to as "virtual memory"), and it gives out this error message. The second hard drive probably did nothing because either a) you hadn't formatted it properly b) Illustrator wasn't set up to use virtual memory on a secondary hard disk.

What I recommend doing is first adding some RAM to your PowerBook, as I previously mentioned. Second, you need to clean up your hard drive. If you delete files and the results aren't showing up on the disk statistics, then you've got some sort of corruption. How you fix this is up to you. You may want to use Disk Utilities to repair your hard disk permissions, which might fix the problem. I personally would back up and reformat the disk, install all the programs again, and start over. By doing this, you should see a significant jump in performance.

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