Ibook freezes, colour wheel spins, and hd clicks? Help!?

hello all you lovely mac people, i'm hoping that one of you will be able to advise me with a problem i've been getting with my g4 ibook.
i've got a standard built model, 30gb HD, 256 ram, 1.2 Ghz. it's about 18 mths old and the HD is pretty full.
in previous months i've had no problems running multiple apps, even adobe illustrator and PS at the same time. in the last week or so my ibook seems to have developed a random dislike for too many apps - the coloured wheel thing just spins and spins and the hd makes a regular clicking sound, like it's trying to fire something up.
the last two times i've had to resort to powering off cos force quit wouldn't work. i know creative suite apps are memory hungry but i've not had problems before - is there any thing that might be effecting my machine?
i've run a virus check with clamxav (can't afford virusX or similar right now!) and found nothing.
Any thoughts on what it might be?
thanks

First of all, letting your hard disk get too full is not a good idea. In fact a general consensus says the arbitrary amount of 85% full is the maximum you should allow your hard disk to get full. The clicking can be fan, or hard drive related, and if it is the latter, your drive is nearly dead. My recommendation is if you haven't already, find a way to backup your data as my FAQ explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
Once you are backed up, then work on cleaning up your least essential files using my tip here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=122973&tstart=20

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Ibook freezes, colour wheel spins, and hd clicks? Help!?

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