On Dec 4, 2023, at 6:39 AM, Sew Walker <sewnyes@...> wrote:
I shut down and restart and constantly get this error. (screen shot attached)
I, not infrequently, hear from users who have gotten this message. In every single case so far, what that error message is telling you isn¡¯t what it seems on its face.
Rather than not having enough RAM, the user always turns out to have a rotating disk hard drive that is too full and/or too fragmented. What the message is telling you is that there is no longer enough free *contiguous* drive space for your application to run properly. There is no space for your application to write scratch, virtual memory, database, etc. meta data to disk.
How big is your hard drive and how full is it? Generally the problem occurs when your drive is approaching 80% full, but this is only a very rough rule of thumb. I¡¯ve seen it happen with drives that are are closer to 60% full and very fragmented, and I¡¯ve seen drives having no problem that are well over 80% full because they have very low fragmentation.
The solution is to offload a bunch of data and then to defragment your hard drive. OR, to get a new, bigger, internal hard drive.
The above guidance is quite a bit different if you instead have an SSD. If that¡¯s the case, let me know and I can tell you what to do for an SSD.
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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)
Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice
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