cut the crap from Leopard

[lost eden]

I currently have a MacBook (1.83GHz C2D, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD) that I bought back around February/March this year. As my first Mac, I blundered my way through a lot of stuff, hacking at things to make them work how I like it, probably in the wrong way, so I want to do a clean format & install when I upgrade to Leopard, just in case there is anything bad that get's copied across if I do an 'upgrade'.

What I want to know, is what I should do to cut the crap out of Leopard, because I want a nice, clean, small, stable install right off. The things I have done in Tiger so far include;

• turning off Spotlight
• turning off disk indexing
• deleting all the included apps & application data that I don't use (Garageband is several GBs on it's own!)
• deleting all of the printers except the one I own (another GB or more there)
• deleting all the languages I don't use
• deleting all the PPC code from everything
• turn off the Genie effect
• etc.

I know already that I'll want to kill Time Machine straight off the bat, but there must be more things to get rid of?

 

[flopticalcube]

Everything else is good but I could not live without Spotlight.

 

[yetanotherdave]

I currently have a MacBook (1.83GHz C2D, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD) that I bought back around February/March this year. As my first Mac, I blundered my way through a lot of stuff, hacking at things to make them work how I like it, probably in the wrong way, so I want to do a clean format & install when I upgrade to Leopard, just in case there is anything bad that get's copied across if I do an 'upgrade'.

What I want to know, is what I should do to cut the crap out of Leopard, because I want a nice, clean, small, stable install right off. The things I have done in Tiger so far include;

• turning off Spotlight
• turning off disk indexing
• deleting all the included apps & application data that I don't use (Garageband is several GBs on it's own!)
• deleting all of the printers except the one I own (another GB or more there)
• deleting all the languages I don't use
• deleting all the PPC code from everything
• turn off the Genie effect
• etc.

I know already that I'll want to kill Time Machine straight off the bat, but there must be more things to get rid of?

Give spotlight a chance, it'a a vast improvement in speed over tiger.
You don't need to turn off time machine, if you never set it up it wont run, however that wont disable the underlying processes that enable time machne, such as FSEvents that logs all filesystem changes, but don't worry, it's tiny and uses minimal resources by design. And much less resource intensive than carbon copy cloner which runs a process at bootup (not startup items, actual bootup) that uses loads of memory.

But yeah, turn off spotlight, spaces, time machine, put the dock on the side so it's not reflective, dashboard, but then you might as well stick with tiger.

 

[koobcamuk]

carbon copy cloner which runs a process at bootup (not startup items, actual bootup) that uses loads of memory.

Does SuperDuper! do this too?

 

[anti-microsoft]

Oh, boy...
You took a wrong turn there!

 

[lost eden]

Give spotlight a chance, it'a a vast improvement in speed over tiger.

I didn't get rid of it because it noticeably slows it down, but because I didn't use it even once in the first 6 months I had it. So I figured I might as well get rid of it & stop it from indexing.

put the dock on the side so it's not reflective

You mean there isn't a hack to return it to the Tiger-style dock? Damn.

but then you might as well stick with tiger

I want Leopard mainly due to Spaces (after using GUI Linux for so long I was frankly appalled that Tiger didn't have multiple desktops when I switched - I still find it funny that Apple are marketting it as one of Leopard's biggest features rather than trying to push it out quietly so nobbody notices it's been missing so long!) & better virtual memory allocation - I still have a 2GB swap file that Photoshop made 10 days ago because Tiger doesn't free up the space when it's finished.

Oh, boy...
You took a wrong turn there!

Huh?

 

[byakuya]

there are a few possibilities to make your dock 2d without putting it on the side.
you can put in some terminal codes manually or just download an app 2Dornot2D (something like that)...it's by the same developer as opaquemenu which gets rid of the transperency in the menubar

 

[yetanotherdave]

Does SuperDuper! do this too?

I don't know, I didn't use it, I just know that something was shoved in the boot sequence that was looping trying to launch another process (I realise this after I uninstalled CCC), and after removing it saw a large increase in RAM usage (like half a gig)