How much space can be saved

[plutnicki]

I'm getting a new MacBook delivered tomorrow, and one of the things I've seen recommended is to do a fresh re-install of OS X right out of the box to eliminate things like languages and printer drivers and applications that are not needed/used.

I BTO'ed a 120Gig Hard Drive, which is more than double my TiBooks space, and I have like 25 Gig free today. I do plan to allocate 20 Gig of this to BootCamp for Win XP.

Is it really necessary to do a fresh install? Can I just delete the apps (like Garageband, say?) that I don't need? How much space am I really saving on the HD by getting rid of languages and printer drivers? Are there other things to "not install"? Would it be easier to just delete things off the drive, rather than do a fresh install?

I'm not against doing it per se, but if we're talking about a small amount of space between a re-install and just deleting a few apps, it doesn't seem worth it.

 

[yippy]

languages and printer drivers will save you about 1GB. However, you can just delete them like you can application. Look in the root leve Library folder for the printer drivers. For languages there are a few programs around, monoligual and delocalizer, that remove uneeded languages from an existing system.

Of note, if you don't want garage band be sure to delete the extra loops as well. Both Garage band and iDVD have several gigabytes of stuff under /Library/application support.

 

[Queso]

Monolingual can also be used to strip the unnecessary PowerPC code out of Universal Binary applications. That should save you a couple of Gigs at least.

 

[robbieduncan]

Monolingual can also be used to strip the unnecessary PowerPC code out of Universal Binary applications. That should save you a couple of Gigs at least.

It might save a few hundred Mb but I'd be surprised if it even saved a Gb on it's own. The actual code is normally a tiny part of the application size. It's the resources that take up all the space and they are not architecture specific.