Safari, iTunes & Skype Opens But Hangs Then Crashes Without Notification.

Question

When I click Safari, iTunes or Skype on the dock of my MacBook, it opens, very slowly. But when I click on anything in-app, be it a bookmark, a song or a contact name, the spinning beachball appears. It spins for a minute or so and then the application quits by itself. Both Safari and iTunes quit without showing a crash report or the "unexpectedly crashed" dialogue, although Skype did show up with one.
Infact, most of the applications installed in my MacBook opens very slowly, much slower than before.
This problem started when I opened iTunes about a week and a half ago. When I clicked on a song to play it, then I opened another application (Safari), the song stopped and the spinning beachball appeared. Then more problems followed after that. I tried removing all the songs in my iTunes library and then installing them back again, all 31 GB of songs. It didn't work.
I read in another forum that it may be due to the amount of free space on the hard drive. I only have 6 GB left out of 180 GB. Is that the case?

Answer 1

I read in another forum that it may be due to the amount of free space on the hard drive. I only have 6 GB left out of 180 GB. Is that the case?
This could be the case. Mac OS X 10 likes to have 10-15GB free to use as virtual memory and to store information temporarily while RAM is busy doing other things.
Your options include installing a larger hard drive (they are pretty cheap these days and it's a 10-minute DIY job) or moving your 31GB iTunes library to an external drive: http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/19/how-to-keep-your-itunes-library-on-an-external-ha rd-drive/