Lately, I’ve had quite a few discussions with clients about the shrinking empty space on their hard drive. Before they know it, they’re getting the “Your hard disk is full” message.

This isn’t too surprising because, if you are like me, you take bazillions of photos and rarely delete any. And as digital cameras are capable of higher and higher resolution, their file sizes are getting larger. (Let’s not even talk about all those songs in iTunes!) Your main hard drive contains the system files for Mac OS X and all the files for all the users. Eventually, even with the best of housekeeping, you will run out of space. At that point it makes sense to invest in an external hard drive, and do a little shuffling around of files to make room on the main drive.

Just about any external drive will work. The most common type has a USB 2.0 connection. Others have Firewire connections. For all around versatility, get one with dual connectivity — both USB 2 and Firewire. You’ll also find that they come in an ever increasing range of capacities — from small 160GB models to 1TB monsters. There are lots of choices. Get the biggest one you can find at the cheapest price! Personally, I have several of the MyBook series of drives by Western Digital.

Once you have your new external hard drive, you can make the move to transfer your entire iPhoto library to it. This will free up a sizeable amount of space on your main hard drive so you can, well… fill it back up again with something else.

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One of the commonly recommended general troubleshooting techniques is to delete the various cache files on your drive.

Doing so can remove unwanted or corrupt settings that an application otherwise continues to use.When dealing with internet-related symptoms, Apple offers similar advice: Trash your cache!

In particular, Apple Support advises going to the Library/Caches folder of the home directory and deleting its contents. This is not the totality of Apple’s advice when dealing with internet-related problems, but it is a key component.

There are other ways to delete cache files beyond dragging them to the trash in the Finder. In particular, several third-party utilities will delete cache files with little more than a click of the mouse. In addition, they offer options as to what subsets of your caches you might want to delete.

Two such utilities are Cocktail (Tiger edition/Leopard edition) and Leopard Cache Cleaner. However, be warned: if you’ve updated to Mac OS X 10.5.3, make sure you also update to the latest versions of these utilities. Both of them have new versions, required for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5.3. For example, Cocktail 4.1.1, released right after OS X 10.5.3, “fixes a bug causing Mac OS X 10.5.3 to freeze during clearing of the system caches and addresses compatibility issues with Automator 2.0.1.”

If your favorite application keeps crashing, fails to load, or freezes your Mac, the problem could be within your plist files.

Property list (plist) files store specific application settings and preferences, and are usually found in either the Library/Preferences directory in the root directory of your hard drive, or in the Library/Preferences directory in your user folder.

Plist files are listed according their host application: for example, TextEdit’s plist file is named com.apple.TextEdit.plist (The beginning part of the name, “com.apple,” indicates the vendor that created the application, insuring that no two plist files will have the exact same name.)

If you have a problematic application, you may have a corrupt plist file. Here’s what you can do.

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There are times when you may want (or need) to start up your Mac in a different manner than usual, or perform certain tasks during startup.

To boot from a DVD, for instance, hold down the C key during startup. Or to put your computer into Firewire Target Disk mode, hold down the T key. Some other key combinations are especially useful during maintenance or troubleshooting.

A short list of keyboard combinations used for various tasks during startup is shown below. Click on the links within the table for more information.

These keys should be pressed right after you hear the startup tone, and held down until you get the expected response.