deleting printer drivers

[Project]

i just received my first ever mac, an 80gb ibook - ive been playing with it for over a day and its blown me away. however, I noticed that it came with around 60gb of hd space left, which kind of threw me. ive ran monolingual and removed all the unwanted language files, but I heard another big hoard is printer drivers.

my question is this - can I delete all of these? The problem is that I intend to buy a printer in the next month or so, and dont know what brand it is going to be. Would that affect me being able to print?

 

[Makosuke]

Would that affect me being able to print?

Probably. The advantage of all those preinstalled drivers is that you can plug more or less any printer produced before the version of the OS you're running in and you're good to go without installing anything.

That said, all the major printer manufacturers (Canon, Epson, HP, even Lexmark though I wouldn't recommend their inkjets) should have downloadable drivers for whatever printer you buy, and I generally install those anyway (either because it's necessary--too new of a model--or just to make sure I've got the latest version). So you're probably just fine getting rid of the preinstalled drivers, unless you end up with something so obscure you need the GIMP Print drivers for it or something. If it's just a name-brand inkjet or major laser, you'll be fine.

 

[Dreadnought]

It saves about 1.6GB of harddisk room. So I recommend it! Also, the language and all those printer files make your mac go slower. Most of them are also loaded when starting up, at least the language files are.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I did that under Panther, to save almost 2 GB. Shouldn't cause any problems. Another tip is to use Delocalizer or similar to get rid of all the different localization for all the languages you don't need, if you want to free up some space of a system already up and running.

Apple has finally caught on, and on the Tiger installer you can actually customize the installer to avoid getting unwanted languages and/or printer drivers installed in the first place.

So (since you have lots of space available) if you want to be totally safe about not deleting anything valuable, do an Archive and Install, customized to only install what you want (and delete the "previous system" folder, when you're sure everything works). Should save you a bit.

Other tips to clean up your HD: Standard maintenance is very easy with OnyX or MainMenu (my choice) and to look for big useless files on the HD, check out OmniDiskSweeper.

 

[Project]

Ive already got well into customising Tiger and installed a ton of programs - would an archive and install undo all of that? I wouldnt mind doing it, just so long as programs and all my iTunes etc that I transfered from my PC are ok...

 

[YS2003]

Is it bad to delete the printer drivers (the ones you don't need such as Xerox, Lexmark, Canon, etc, as my printer is HP only for now) from Library folders? Also, for the additional language, does it cause any problem if you delete the lanugauge package from Receipt folders in Libarary? I found .pkg file for various lanuagues. When I installed Tiger, I forgot to take out those features I don't need.