HELP. i am NOT a puter geek, which is WHY i have an OLD OSX from 2006.

[freshwest]

8. Look at the top bar running across the top of the screen.

That is your Finder tool bar. Going right from the Apple icon, see the word 'Go'.

Click on that and a drop-down list appears. Pick the option called Utilities.

The first thing will probably be Activity Monitor. Click on it and it will give you lines of data and horizontal bars to click on above a pie graph.

Click on Disk Usage. You will see sections there and to the left, lines showing Space Utilized and Space Free. If you still have the original 250g, for optimal performance you should no less than 20g in the Space Free line. Those are needed by the system itself to find things. When it doesn't have that free space, things freeze up.

Your most essential program on your computer is Finder since it allows you to navigate all things. Problems with Finder can show your Hard Drive is not functioning as you want. There are some things that happen in addtion to freezing, such as item or icon preview not working right, losing the icons or the color inside folders, names not showing up on files, and smaller inconveniences.

All of those are signs that your files are being corrupted. This is part of the life cycle of files and electronics, the current goes through and things wear out, AFAIK. That's why redundancy is a good habit to have. Burning files on discs, or putting them on a back up drive. Preventing power surges and moving equipment or the connections. Pretty senstive stuff. And it all is dependent on Finder.

Open Activity Monitor and if you are moving a lot of files around and are close to capacity, you might leave it in the Dock for easy access. I keep there when I am moving many gigabytes.