SPace on my hard-drive

Can someone tell me how I find out how much space I have on my hard-drive

To find the information, simply right click on the hard drive icon and select 'Get Info' from the menu. That will give you the drive capacity, space available, and space used.

There are a number of possible causes of system freezes, but it would help if you could describe what happens when your mini does this - whether there is any specific software you are running, whether the system locks up and nothing happens, the mouse can be moved, the spinning beachball appears, whether the system comes back to operational state if left alone, what error messages appear on screen (if any).... the more detail in terms of what symptoms you see, the easier it may be to identify the problem and (hopefully) find a solution.

It could be hardware related, and certainly full drive could cause some forms of system freezes, as could memory. But it could also be software or MacOS related, and depending on whether the freeze is permanent or temporary, could even be related to prebinding or permissions.

Before you do anything else, make sure you have a backup of all your important data!

One thing you could try is a general-purpose utility for tidying and cleaning the system. Download a copy of YASU ( http://jimmitchelldesign.com/projects/yasu/), set it to run all tasks, quit all other applications and let it run until it reboots the system. This checks and resolves disk permissions, updates prebinding, rotates and cleans out log files, performs a range of cache cleaning routines and even if it doesn't fix this issue, having run it it should make further troubleshooting rather easier as a consequence of the tasks it has completed.