Hard Drive/Space Problem, please help!

My laptop has been acting strangely since the start of this year. I've had it for five years now & it started popping up "Start up disk is full" message. But I really don't keep a lot of stuff, few pictures, one movie, few family videos & old essays/powerpoints.
But anyways I started cleaning up stuff, but the Available data went from 1.62 GB to 1.4 GB & then slightly higher & now stopped 1.33 GB.
Is this a virus? What should I do?
Any suggestions would help so much. Thank you in advance.

Do yourself a huge favour. Get an external drive and make a back up. Do this immediately because you are in danger of losing everything on your laptop. Your hard drive is already in distress.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1553

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