Reinstalling OS X to remove bundled apps and free space

[zen]

My Macbook Air will arrive sometime this month, and I've gone for the 64GB SSD 11" model.

I've noticed a few people saying they have reinstalled OS X when their machine has arrived to remove the bundled apps and get some drive space.

I have never had a machine with an SSD before, and I was just wondering whether doing a clean install would affect the performance of the Macbook at all? I've heard stories about how certain things can degrade the performance of the SSD, but I don't really understand the technology yet.

As this is only going to be a portable writing machine, I certainly don't need any of iLife or the other apps that come pre-installed.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

I left my 11.6" 64GB Air as stock and used two applications: Monolingual and Clusters.

Monolingual removes any additional language localizations on applications. Xslimmer also does this while also removing any PowerPC architecture in the application.

Clusters uses Snow Leopard's native compression feature to compress files and folders. I have done this to all my applications and do not see any degradation in performance.

With those two applications, I was able to regain a full 3GB of space back, and do not have any technical issues with any of the applications.

 

[fswmacguy]

As soon as I got mine, I booted it up to see if it was actually working and immediately stuck the little USB drive in there. I removed all the extra languages and some other things that I never use (like all those language fonts).

BeyondtheTech (above) mentioned you should use Monolingual straight from the desktop. I just did a reinstall because I like to be sure that the OS is going to have exactly and only what I tell it to have.

 

[Thiol]

have never had a machine with an SSD before, and I was just wondering whether doing a clean install would affect the performance of the Macbook at all? I've heard stories about how certain things can degrade the performance of the SSD, but I don't really understand the technology yet.

Don't worry about it. The tests done so far show that this SSD is resilient. A clean install of the OS X won't hurt performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4
http://www.macworld.com/article/156227/2010/12/macbookair_torturetests.html