Out of hard drive memory

My Mac mini is out of hard drive capacity. I bought an external drive, but I am unsure which files to move onto the second drive without affecting the ability of the system to start up and perform basic functions. Mac online help was unable to answer this question for me. Can anyone out there help me?
Also, for some reason there is a discrepancy between the available size as shown by interrogating each of my root folders, and the available size as indicated by "whatsize.dmg", the software I downloaded to advise me on how much capacity I have left in the machine. Again, this problem stumped Mac online personnel. Any ideas about the best way to determine available capacity on my Mac mini?

WhatSize will be the best way to obtain a trustworthy indication of available space and space folders are taking. The Finder is designed not to be able to see certain files that are critical to MacOS, and thus while it can usually give a pretty good idea of the space a folder takes, if that folder contains hidden files it will not be an accurate figure. If those hidden files are large, it can be significantly at variance with WhatSize, which can see such files.
In terms of what you can move - it depends a great deal on what you have on your system in the first place. You can, for example, move your entire 'Documents' folder (harddrive>users>yourname>documents) to the external, because the system doesn't keep track of any content there - they are just documents. However, this often won't save much space unless you typically keep a significant number of large files in that location. You can also move iTunes and iPhoto libraries (harddrive>users>yourname>music and harddrive>users>yourname>pictures respectively), but you need to tell iTunes and iPhoto if you do this so they can find the files. You can also move any iMovie or iDVD projects, the former in harddrive>users>yourname>movies and the latter usually found in your harddrive>users>yourname folder. These latter are usually large files.
You cannot move your entire user folder or any folder marked 'library', nor the folder called 'system'. You can move the applications folder, but Apple applications such as iMovie, iTunes etc will then not update correctly.
You can also

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