Abnormal harddrive capacity?

[CraigB]

I just purchased a new stock Macbook (posting on it right now. The side towards battery gets pretty toasty, but doesn't seem to show any signs of a whine or moo).

So supposedly, it's a 60 GB harddrive. I understand that with the formatting and whatnot, it's more like 55 GB or so when I first boot up the computer. But after a simple software update, and Microsoft Office install, I'm down to approximately 37 GB. Lets say that my Office + Updates took 1 GB of harddisk space....that would only leave me at approximately 38/55 GB.

Can anyone explain why this is so, or if it's even normal? iLife cannot possibly bite out 15 GB of HDD space could it? And if so, how would I go about removing those programs (quite new to the OSX world).

Thanks a bunch.

 

[celebrian23]

Mac osx installs things- ilife, other apps, printer drivers, etc. Like my 80GB is formatted to 74GB, but it started its life with 55GB.

 

[CraigB]

Ah, so it seems like my harddrive is normal then. Thank goodness. I was wondering what happened to 15 GB of space.

In that case, do I uninstall some of the iLife apps by dragging the root file into the trashcan?

 

[kevin.rivers]

You might want to do a reinstall of the OS and remove things manually that way. You can free up a lot of space by removing languages and any features you wont need.

Shouldnt take more than an hour or so.

 

[chairguru22]

ive asked this before and here's what i learned.

its 55GB because thats how the OS reads your harddrive whereas manufactures label it as 60GB. in actuality, its the same capacity, just measured differently. (a GB is like 10^9 whereas an OS measures it as 2^30 or something)

also, OSX and iLife takes up a lot of space and office would as well. 37GB sounds about right. you can use a program called monolingual to delete languages you dont need and that should free up 3GB. you can delete printer drivers you dont need and thatll save you another GB. you can delete idvd themes and 'apple loops' to save yourself up to another 3GB. just search in the forums for these things to recover some HD space.

chairguru22

 

[Rovman]

If its a brand new mac and you've not yet started personalizing it and moving all your work/files onto it, it may be a good idea to reinstall Mac OS X and customize the install.

You can get a fresh install down to about 3-4 gb while still keeping most of the cool stuff (iLife etc)

 

[CraigB]

Thanks for the help guys. Really appreciate it