Just a quick tip for my dear reader(s).
Funny thing that hard drive space is, no matter how big it is, there’s always only few gigs left of it. Sunday is my hard drive clean up day, the day of the week when I try to free up about 10 Gb to be able to go through the week. One utility to visually see where all the space has gone or what taking it up is Disk Inventory X. Check it out. Reason why I’m bringing that up is because I noticed an evil 2 Gb file lurking in /private/var/vm/
The Sleep Image. sleepimage is file that stores all the data that is currently in RAM. It’s written when the computer goes to sleep. (You can notice this by looking at the light in the front. When it slowly blinks it’s a sleep but before this it’s permanently on while it writes stuff on the disk. You should be very careful moving your computer while this is being done as you might damage the hard drive.) Purpose of the sleepimage is that if your computer runs out of battery or power fails while asleep, it can recover to the previous state without having to restart. The space is always reserved for this so it can’t run out. There’s three good reasons not to use save sleep. It takes longer to fall asleep, it makes the whole process less staple and I just rather have the space in active use.
To disable save sleep, all you need to do is run these two commands in Terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
First disables it, the second deletes the sleepimage file. To re-activate it just run the first command but with 1 instead of 0 in the end. If you’ve just upgraded to Leopard you should check what state it’s on; it’s on by default and even with regular upgrade install it seems to go back to default.
–kristian