Wow. How do I find out why my hard drive is suddenly full?

I'm a bit nervous. I have a 60GB hard drive on my Powerbook. I had about 33GB left consistently for probably over a year. I maintain, watch and use it REALLY carefully. I came home from work today, woke my computer from sleep, and an warning was on the screen saying Your Start Up Disk Is Full ... I'm thinking how is that even possible.
I doubled clicked my Hard Drive, and sure enough, everything is saying I have only about 490mb left!!! I have not installed any new programs, have not put a bunch of music, video, games anything on since it was at its normal 33GB.
Please, from any experienced users, any ideas what may have happened? How to find out what is suddenly (and through no intentional doing of my own) on there taking up the sudden quantity of hard drive space? How to possibly isolate what caused it? I'm a bit worried about what's going on. Thank you for any help or direction. Mark
I already restarted, repaired permissions, restarted, etc ...

You're Welcome melange!
I posted that article, as it addresses the insufficient hard disk space, not for the RAM info.
768MB is sufficient.
When you ran Repair Disk, were there any repairs done?
Here are this instructions for running the Cron Scripts in Terminal.
Quit all applications/programs.
Navigate to HD > Applications > Utilities.
Double click on Terminal, to open.
At the prompt, type:
sudo periodic daily
Press Return.
Enter your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.
This will execute the daily script that is sheduled to run every night.
When completed, repeat this procedure, but change the command to:
sudo periodic weekly
This one rebuilds a database or two, and usually takes somewhat longer to complete. It is scheduled to run once a week.
Repeat again, with command:
sudo periodic monthly
Or they can all be run in one pass, with this command:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
When the tasks complete, and return to the prompt, you may quit Terminal.
Also review this article Freeing space on your Mac OSX startup disk, authored by Dr Smoke.
ali b
Message was edited by: ali brown

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