New to mbp and q bout snow leopard memory and battery

[wez99950]

My sincere apologies if these questions have been asked before but i had a look and i couldn't find the answers.
I just got the mbp today and in the box was the Snow Leopard cd. I installed it but it took up 15GB of space. Is that normal?
Would it make a difference if I did a clean install? How could i do that? - sorry, i've had my ibook G4 for 5 years and the mbp is very different so feel like i'm new to mac all over again!
Just one other question - i have the laptop charging now, should i calibrate it? Is that where i charge it to 100% and then just let it drain it completely and then charge it up again? The battery in my old ibook was shot to hell so don't want to do that again. Gonna be good with this laptop
Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[gr8tfly]

Did you do the default installation from within Leopard? If so, I'm not sure how you lost space. You should have freed up space - over 7GB in most cases (I saved 11GB on mine).

Are you comparing the space used after installing SL to 10.5? If so, that number will be larger, since SL calculates disk space using 1K = 1000 bytes, instead of 1024 bytes. If you check the free space, that will also be larger. To find the true savings, you need to convert the old to the new method.

As for the battery topic: a quick search should have returned a lot of threads on the subject. This one is from the other day: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/780054/

Enjoy SL and your new MBP!

 

[wez99950]

Did you do the default installation from within Leopard? If so, I'm not sure how you lost space. You should have freed up space - over 7GB in most cases (I saved 11GB on mine).

Are you comparing the space used after installing SL to 10.5? If so, that number will be larger, since SL calculates disk space using 1K = 1000 bytes, instead of 1024 bytes. If you check the free space, that will also be larger. To find the true savings, you need to convert the old to the new method.

As for the battery topic: a quick search should have returned a lot of threads on the subject. This one is from the other day: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/780054/

Enjoy SL and your new MBP!

Maybe i got it wrong and misread the capacity and available numbers. Does this make sense - that; I have
Capacity: 159.7
Available: 146.58
Used: 13.12 ??
Would i have already used 13GB without downloading/installing/migrating anything?

I don't really know what the default installation is that you're talking about...showing my ignorance here! i just stuck the cd in and it installed away

Thanks for the link!

 

[Ride9650]

it sounds like you probably did an upgrade installation, which would retain all the stuff that came pre-installed on the MBP, hence the loss of 15gb of space.
The computers ship with alot of useful, though often times unnecessary stuff preinstalled like printer drivers or support for other languages,and Ilife.

Since the snow leopard cd that you have will only do upgrades from what I can tell, you'll have to use the regular leopard cd that came with your computer to wipe and reinstall everything, before upgrading to snow leopard.

In the process of installing leopard, there will at some point, be a button that says "customize". Click on it, and then you'll be able to take out the extra printer drivers, languages, etc..

 

[wez99950]

it sounds like you probably did an upgrade installation, which would retain all the stuff that came pre-installed on the MBP, hence the loss of 15gb of space.
The computers ship with alot of useful, though often times unnecessary stuff preinstalled like printer drivers or support for other languages,and Ilife.

Since the snow leopard cd that you have will only do upgrades from what I can tell, you'll have to use the regular leopard cd that came with your computer to wipe and reinstall everything, before upgrading to snow leopard.

In the process of installing leopard, there will at some point, be a button that says "customize". Click on it, and then you'll be able to take out the extra printer drivers, languages, etc..

Thanks for that. Ok you're talking to someone who has never done anything like this before so i don't want to mess up my shiny new laptop! Is it worth doing what you said, as in, would i make much of a difference memory wise? is there a risk that i could mess up the laptop?

i'm sorry but if i were to, is this what is a clean upgrade? anyway if i were to do this how would i do it? i'm just confused when you say wipe and reinstall and then upgrade to snow leopard. doesn't that put me in the same spot i am in now? Or do i wipe it completely, don't reinstall but just install snow leopard?
God, i think i am making this very complicated!

 

[Ride9650]

Thanks for that. Ok you're talking to someone who has never done anything like this before so i don't want to mess up my shiny new laptop! Is it worth doing what you said, as in, would i make much of a difference memory wise? is there a risk that i could mess up the laptop?

i'm sorry but if i were to, is this what is a clean upgrade? anyway if i were to do this how would i do it? i'm just confused when you say wipe and reinstall and then upgrade to snow leopard. doesn't that put me in the same spot i am in now? Or do i wipe it completely, don't reinstall but just install snow leopard?
God, i think i am making this very complicated!

No it wouldn't put you in the same position unless you ignore the last paragraph in my previous post.

There is no way to mess up your computer by re-installing the OS. As to how much of a difference it could make, I'd say it would make a reasonably significant difference. On mine, I have a 500gb drive. When I first installed snow leopard, I did it exactly the same way you did. My remaining space was somewhere around 484gb. At first I wasn't going to bother doing a clean install but I ended up doing it anyways. After that I had somewhere round 499gb of space left.

Its pretty self explanatory once you load up the installer, and also you mentioned that you had an Ibook which, at the very least should have come with OS X 10.3(aka Panther), which isn't very different in terms of usage from Leopard or Snow Leopard(aka 10.5/10.6). Thats why I didn't go into too much detail.

There should have been two other dvds that came with your computer. Insert disk one. A new window should pop up with a few things, click on the image that says, "Install Mac OS X"

The computer will restart.

Follow the directions and go through each window. At some point the installer will detect that you have snow leopard and prompt you to change your install format by clicking on a button titled "options"

Once you click options, there should only be two choices, an "archive and install" and an "erase and install"

since you want to reclaim that lost 15gb, do an erase and install.

After you select that, on the final screen there should be a button that says "customize". click on that

Another window will load allowing you to select which options you'd like to remove.

click ok.

click install.

Once that is done, if you want to put ILife back on the computer, the installer for that is on disk 2