Question about HDD space affecting Computer Speed

No, not really

at least not performance wise.

You may have a 1 or 1/2 second lag on accessing files, but really not anything that would actually slow performance speed.

And yeah, it is the ram, 256MB is like almost nothing nowadays.

If you want to get right down to it, more space the computer has to search through on the hard drive will result in a longer load time, but that time will be fractions of a second.

A 400MHz G4 won't outrun a 1.42GHz G4- it doesn't matter what case it's in.

I know at school we have a 400MHz PowerMac G4, and it certainly isn't about to beat anything.

What you might want to do is download c-o-c-k-tail and run the cron scripts.

As far as hard drive space goes, it could. If you are maxing out your actual RAM the system will use part of the hard drive as virtual memory. The page swaps alone can slow you down a good clip when it's writing/reading to the HDD all the time. If your drive is nearly full, there is less free space for the system to use.

Also, IIRC, the Mini uses shared graphics which means that part of the CPUs power is being used to drive the display. The PowerMac has a dedicated card.

i know its the ram, my dad is going to max it out to 1GB, but now he thinks its the HDD.
its incredibly slow, but its not that bad for me, im a student, the most taxing thing i do is watch TV shows on iTunes

One more question though, when i get the 1GB RAM do you think it WILL run faster? because if it doesnt im most likely going to get in trouble(i share this with my little bro)

PowerMac G4: 400MHz PowerPC G4, 512GB RAM
Mac mini--: 1.42 PowerPC G4, 1GB RAM

i know the specs dont lie, my computer looks a lot faster looking at that, but i dont know if theres any kind of wierd speed boostage on the PowerMac. BTW his HDD is not nearly filled.Like I said before, the Power Mac probably has a faster HDD, and it would also likely have a bigger L2 cache which would make the hard drive faster than the one on the mini.

Open Terminal and typesudo periodic daily weekly monthly
and then your Admin password to do the same thing as what baggss suggested.

The RAM will increase the speed at which the mini operates, but so will clearing hard drive space or installing a new drive.

Actually, the space left on your hard drive does play a little role, though not very significant. For example, if you run an application that requires more ram that what's present on your system, then it takes up the extra memory needed from your hard drive. The change in speed might not be significant, but nevertheless, it does affect your speed by a bit.

As for the RAM, I am struggling to run a few games with 512MB ram!!

lol...

Caesar 4 lags like nuts some times. Games like call of duty 2, GTA SA, NFS MW, run fine.

how did you get GTA ? they have a computer version?
Yep

http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas/pc/

Hard drive speed does affect the system. If you have a 5400rpm drive it will take longer for the OS to access the information you need than if you had a 7200rpm or even the 10,000rpm raptor. Rest rest depends on RAM, bus speed, and on, etc.

You can run world of warcraft, my Mac Mini does same specs as yours. Although it runs like crap :shake:

ugh i know. when i want to game i use my dads 17" Macbook Pro. But when hes away at work, all thats compatible is Simcity 4 that i own. Aspry(sp?) game agent helps tho.

Lol.. Just tried Call of Juarez. The lag is just cool. My character moves 15 seconds after I press the arrow keys. I spent nearly 10 minutes trying to quit that game!
Why didn't you just force quit it?