Macbook Hard Drive Filled Up?

[Patrick425]

Hi, I just bought a new macbook with 120 gb hard drive. I've installed only a few programs, maybe 5, and have filled it up with about 5 gigs of music. I have only had this computer for about a week, and already it states I've used up 26 gigs. 26 gigs??? Where has all my hard drive space gone? I was just wondering if this was normal for mac users. I really do not know how I've already filled this hard drive up 26 gigs. I've been real nervous lately and it seems as if my hard drive is being filled up more and more everyday, even though I am doing nothing. So would someone please tell me if what I am experiencing is normal?

Thanks in advance,
Patrick

 

[Scarlet Fever]

Double-click on the HDD icon on the desktop, highlight the Library and System folders, and press command+I, and tell us what the size of these files are. I have a feeling they would be eating a lot of the unexplained ~20GB

 

[Patrick425]

My system and library files add up to 11.3. Is this normal? If I total up everything completely, it equals 22.4 gigs. Do all macs have this much space taken up from the start? Why do the system and library files total up to so much? Thanks again for the help.

 

[richard.mac]

a 120 GB hard drive is actually ~ 112 GB when formatted. the recommended minimum space to install Leopard is 9 GB so Leopard is ~9 GB in size. youve filled 5 GB of music and say 5 apps is around 1 GB in size. so youve used approx

9 + 5 + 1 GB = 15 GB

112 - 15 GB = 97 GB

so it looks like youve used 120 - 97 GB = 23 GB

the other ~3 GB could be your applications or some other files on your HDD.

you can use monolingual to remove all the languages, xslimmer to remove all the PPC code in your apps, delete all the printer drivers in /Library/Printers or /System/Library/Printers and delete the Garage Band loops in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/ if you want. this will give you a few GBs back. but only do this if you are comfortable in doing it.