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zeppelin68

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 25, 2007
134
0
I have a macbook pro with the 160gb hard drive. It's partitioned 100gb OSX and 60gb windows.(too much but w/e) Under system profiler, the OSX drive's capacity is only 88gb. Right now I only have about 30gb left. My Itunes takes up 10gigs, and I have about 9gigs in video, but other than that I can't think of what is taking up so much space. Does anyone know of anything I can delete?
 
You could always use an app like WhatSize in an administrator account to find where all the space is being used. If that doesn't help, then do a quick search 'round here for similar threads asking about what can safely be removed from OSX. :)
 
160GB hard drive - and Windows gets 60GB. Formatted capacity isn't exactly 160GB remember, so you won't get 100GB for your Mac partition. 88GB sounds right.

Virtual Memory takes up some.
 
My iTunes library is around 20-25 GB and it uses a large chunk of my hard drive (64 GB Mac, 10 GB XP). I've had to start regularly moving files that I use to an external hard drive because of the limited space. :(

Formatting is not the reason for the drastic difference of 12 GB above, although it is responsible for a minute difference. On a computer, 1024 bytes = 1 kilobytes, but hard drive manufacturers use 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte to calculate the drive size that they advertise... it's rather deceptive. When dealing with larger hard drives especially, this can account for a very large amount of space.
 
To clean up your hard drive in general I recommend the following steps:

- use OmniDiskSweeper (not free) or my personal favorite WhatSize (free) to determine what all is taking up room on your HDD and where it is
- remove GarageBand and iDVD if you do not need them - that should free up around 6 GB right there
- check out /Library/Printers/ - 2 GB of printer drivers that you may or may not need
- use Monolingual to remove the unnecessary language resources from your Mac*. Another option is to use Delocalizer
- lastly, you could always use AppZapper (not free) or uApp (free) to ensure that when you uninstall any programs that all those pesky sub-folders, etc. are deleted

That should just about do it. :cool:

* a note about Monolingual. If you are not careful this can seriously screw up your Mac if it is Intel-based. Basically, leave the Architectures settings alone. If you delete G3, G4, G5 then anything which is PPC-based which will try to run under Rosetta, won't. Otherwise, Monolingual is great. ;)
 
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