Did you do a fresh install?

mario24601 said:

I have been using my Air for a couple weeks now, when you guys got your new 2010 Air did you do a fresh install with the USB drive?

I am reading you can save space and maybe speeds it up, is that right? What are your thoughts? And what is the process? Thanks.

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as soon as i got my MBA i grab the usb stick the did a fresh install with customization. removing all the language and remove also some of the stuff on iLife that i dont need like iDVD.

no, the speed will remains the same. it is just you will save a lot of space

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How did you do it? Just plug it in and reboot? On the first boot up?

yes, same day i got it.

how much space is available after the first boot up? without removing anything?

viperGTS said:

how much space is available after the first boot up? without removing anything?

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My MBA is on the way but I can field that.

Formatted space is always less than advertised. This is true with any type of hard drive, whether it be SSD or spinny, even iPods.

From what I can tell, the SL install is ~5GB. So it's easy to do the math here: 128GB - 5GB = ~123GB (give or take a gig or two).

You are effectively getting the advertised amount of space.

Crap I forgot to do this. Ehhh, I can always use monolingual to get almost the same result.

fswmacguy said:

My MBA is on the way but I can field that.

Formatted space is always less than advertised. This is true with any type of hard drive, whether it be SSD or spinny, even iPods.

From what I can tell, the SL install is ~5GB. So it's easy to do the math here: 128GB - 5GB = ~123GB (give or take a gig or two).

You are effectively getting the advertised amount of space.

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so on the 64 GB i could expect about 55 GB+ ?

T4R06 said:

as soon as i got my MBA i grab the usb stick the did a fresh install with customization. removing all the language and remove also some of the stuff on iLife that i dont need like iDVD.

no, the speed will remains the same. it is just you will save a lot of space

Click to expand...

having always done installs of osx using cd/dvd...how long did it take using usb?

Just got rid of 1.35GBs worth of languages and PPC architectures using monolingual. Now how did I use to get rid of printer drivers? Ugh, it's been a long time.

kyle.c said:

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How did you do it? Just plug it in and reboot? On the first boot up?

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You have to start Disc Utility in the beginning after the reboot, otherwise you won't have the opportunity to do a custom install.

deedas said:

Now how did I use to get rid of printer drivers? Ugh, it's been a long time.

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They aren't there from the beginning. When you plug in a printer Software Update downloads the driver for that printer.

Yes, for three reason:
1) always do it to get rid of things like GarageBand which I never use
2) I have normally two partitions on my Mac's and wanted the same
3) wanted to try the USB stick

ChristianJapan said:

Yes, for three reason:
1) always do it to get rid of things like GarageBand which I never use
2) I have normally two partitions on my Mac's and wanted the same
3) wanted to try the USB stick

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same here regarding item 1. takes up like 1.5gb of space. using flash compared to regular hard drive, took me 25 minutes to completely load the OS, was amazing

viperGTS said:

so on the 64 GB i could expect about 55 GB+ ?

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You should expect to have ~60GB of readily available space (give or take a gig or two).

MBA owners (or any notebook with SSD for that matter) should stick the included Snow Leopard USB stick in their MBA and do a fresh install as soon as they ensure that the MBA boots up in the first place. I always remove the extra languages, shaves off a good chunk of crap.

kyle.c said:

How did you do it? Just plug it in and reboot? On the first boot up?

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Boot up normally first, to make sure the SSD works. Then follow the instructions provided by MacRumors, linked at the top of the MacBook Air forum page. Substitute "USB install stick" for "install disk".

Any computer I buy, the first thing I do is reformat the drive and install the OS as I want it, not as apple thinks I want it. I usually only select the specific printers, and omit, X11, fonts languages that I don't want.

I got the 13 inch MBA with 256GB of flash storage so that I wouldn't have to worry about saving storage space. I genuinely admire those of you who can make less storage work by using some of the techniques described in this thread but I lacked the will.

My old Santa Rosa MBP, which the MBA has replaced for most purposes, has a 160GB hard drive, so the MBA's 256GB of storage has been a pleasure. I used Apple's OS X installation as it was out of the box and then migrated the MBP's programs, settings, and data from a Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule. With the exception of a couple of minor glitches, the MBA's setup is now identical to the MBP's. The Migration Assistant is pretty neat.

22 mins is damn fast for a re-install!

I just deleted all the apps I didn't want through the Applications folder, then used CleanMyMac and Monolingual to fully delete everything. Such a breeze, Macs!

I am new to Mac and I have only been using my late 2010 MBA for a couple of days, so a fresh install will not be too much of a hassle to me.

But, I am curious about Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner. What if I backup my data, apps and/or settings now with Time Machine or CCC, and then do a fresh install to remove languages and apps I don't need. When I then restore the data, would it put the unwanted languages and stuff back into the system?

gloryunited said:

I am new to Mac and I have only been using my late 2010 MBA for a couple of days, so a fresh install will not be too much of a hassle to me.

But, I am curious about Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner. What if I backup my data, apps and/or settings now with Time Machine or CCC, and then do a fresh install to remove languages and apps I don't need. When I then restore the data, would it put the unwanted languages and stuff back into the system?

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I asked this a while ago and now I really want to do a fresh install.

I backed up via Time Machine and also backed up the boot camp partition as an image file using WinClone, all on an external hard drive.

When I restore from Time Machine, would it restore the unwanted language files back to the system? Do I have to choose which directories/files to be restored?

this is my first mac and my first time using Time Machine, thanks

I used mine for a week or so and then did a reinstall. I did my reinstall on the copy I made of the Apple USB key because I'd prefer to use that then abuse the one provided by apple