how to clean out an old G5 mac?

[proverbs]

i had a mbp c2s and decided to give it to my sister and take her single 1.8ghz G5. my sister is a graphic designer so it would be much more useful if she had it and her G5 suites me just fine.

anyways, i just finished doing the migration this past week and so far, the mbp seems to be working fine for her. as for the G5 - im leaving all her files and junk in the computer for another couple weeks, in case some of her files or apps have errors in it from the migration. but after a few weeks, i wanted to clean it out. i dont want to do a whole format, but just delete a bunch of her apps and all her files.

what is the best way going about doing this? can i just delete the apps and be done with it - or is there a certain program i should use? and should i also do a Disk Partition and Repair Permissions, etc?

TIA.

 

[mad jew]

A disk partition won't really help your situation, and neither will repairing permissions. If I were you, I'd just create a new user account and run from there. Manually delete apps if need be.

 

[Dimwhit]

Use a program like AppZapper to get rid of the applications. It will help clear out all the prefs, etc. as well.

 

[Avaritia]

Generally Applications are only installed within the Applications folder and a preference made in the ~/library/preference folder. So, removing it from both places is usually all you have to do- at least it removes the bulk of the space. You might also want to check your startup folder and login items though as well, since some programs will have startup routines that run when turning on your computer. (Preferences follow a naming scheme, so they are easy to find, all adobe preferences are com.adobe.xxxx.plist. While Microsoft ones are com.microsoft.xxxx.plist; and so on).

A nice tip though, if you are trying to free up space. If you right click, or ctrl+click on an application and go to get info, you will be able to uninstall the various language packages for that program which will recover quite a bit of space.

 

[proverbs]

sweet! thanks for the tips. i will give it a try right now.

 

[mad jew]

A nice tip though, if you are trying to free up space. If you right click, or ctrl+click on an application and go to get info, you will be able to uninstall the various language packages for that program which will recover quite a bit of space.

That's an excellent tip. If you're wanting to do this en masse, then look into using an app like Monolingual. However, leave the English languages alone, and don't touch the architectures.