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Deleting things to free up space

7

7254278

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 11, 2004
2,365
0
NYC
Hey all,
I wanna free up some space in my ibook and I was wondering, is it possible to get rid of all those things I dont use like the extra OS X languages and Printer Drivers and or other things installed from the OS 10.3 DVD without reinstalling the OS itself? How much space do printer drivers take up? Also can I delete quicktime and use VLC instead or is quicktime needed by other programs?
 
quigleybc said:
If you don't think you'll ever have one of those printers, feel free to delete them...


I doubt you can trash Quicktime, cuz i think iTunes runs off of it, as well as other iLife apps..not 100% sure on that though..
Click to expand...
How do I trash the print drivers? Also how much free HD space do I need to run decently, 3GB or so? Also I have my HD parttioned into 30gb and 30gb, will my computer run slower if the partition without OS X(I use it for file storage) is 100% full?
 
Everyone should trash all their printer drivers and down load just the latest version of what they need from the manufacturers website. I had 1.5gig of rubbish drivers.

Monolingual got rid of another 2 gig of languages that I didn't even know existed. I kept all the English languages US UK and Aus.

But like the dare devil that I am I crazily deleted the US eng language. And left UK and Aus only. Guess what, nothing bad happened.
 
be careful as to what you delete. I did that once and I was unable to start up my machine once.
 
Patmian212 said:
How do I trash the print drivers? Also how much free HD space do I need to run decently, 3GB or so? Also I have my HD parttioned into 30gb and 30gb, will my computer run slower if the partition without OS X(I use it for file storage) is 100% full?
Click to expand...

I honestly have ~1 Gig free, small drives are a bitch, its the one thing i wish I could have custom built. My iBook doesnt seem to slow down at all, but that may be because this iBook could kill my old computer with one hand (if it had hands, you get the point).

Oh heres a picture of my free space,
 

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dogbone said:
Everyone should trash all their printer drivers and down load just the latest version of what they need from the manufacturers website. I had 1.5gig of rubbish drivers.

Monolingual got rid of another 2 gig of languages that I didn't even know existed. I kept all the English languages US UK and Aus.

But like the dare devil that I am I crazily deleted the US eng language. And left UK and Aus only. Guess what, nothing bad happened.
Click to expand...

Really, you can download everything that you need for a printer from the manufacturer's website? If this was true, then why are printer drivers even included in Mac OS?
 
rye9 said:
If this was true, then why are printer drivers even included in Mac OS?
Click to expand...

Because "It just works." (TM)

OS X is supposed to need minimal effort to get peripherals working. It just makes it simpler for most folk. But if you want the latest features/bug fixes, it's always worth going to the manufacturer's website.
 
Just don't go doing your hard drive housekeeping at 4 in the morning. I did this once and my devil-may-care attitude at that time of day (haven't had any work from that fellow for over a year-let's trash the whole folder x6) resulted in a lot of extra work over the next few months. Nothing worse than having to do stuff all over again from scratch.
 
Patmian212 said:
How do I trash the print drivers? Also how much free HD space do I need to run decently, 3GB or so? Also I have my HD parttioned into 30gb and 30gb, will my computer run slower if the partition without OS X(I use it for file storage) is 100% full?
Click to expand...

Don't delete Quicktime! There are dependencies all over the place. If you remove it you'll break more than just iLife.

There are a number of things you can safely remove. Printer drivers have been mentioned, and that's true. Internationalization/foreign language support. Certain fonts, although you should be careful with this. Assuming you don't use them, you can trash all the Asian language fonts for instance.

About free disk space. The OS needs a "reasonable" amount of free disk space for virtual memory to perform properly. If you've partitioned your disk in half, and the OS portion has available space you're OK. 3GB is more than enough. The computer won't run any slower. Writes to the full partition might be a bit slower as the disk tries to find enough space to perform the write. (in other words, as the OS tries to deal with fragmentation)
 
So how should I go about deleting printer files? Since I have a folder in my printers folder for my printer, should I just go and delete each individual printer folder(the folders with brand names)? Can someone assist me? Here's what my printer folder looks like...
 

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