Question About OSX 10.4

[Zwhaler]

Hey everyone, someone I know is going to purchase either a macbook or a macbook pro, and they (and I aswell) were wondering how much HD space OSX takes up, because I don't want him to get a 60GB hard drive and have less than 30 left after installing everything. So about how much space do you think (or know) it takes up?

 

[CoMpX]

My iBook has a 60GB hard drive and I have about 30GB free, but I also have 7.5 GB of music on it. So you should be fine as far as space goes.

 

[WildCowboy]

Default install with all iLife apps and printer drivers will take up on the order of 20 GB. You can easily strip this down by getting rid of unneeded languages (using Monolingual), and printer drivers...that can save about 4 GB total. If he's not planning on using GarageBand, getting rid of loops can save you another 5 GB. iDVD themes also take up several GB of space, so getting rid of some or all of them depending on his needs will save a ton of space. You can actually get a basic OS X install down to well under 5 GB total if you don't want iLife apps. Not reasonable for a lot of people, but I've done it on an old backup iBook with a 10 GB hard drive that I only use for web access and some very light Office work.

 

[Zwhaler]

Ok, thanks for the help. I do plan to use Garage Band, but to me getting rid of Printer Drivers sounds kind of scary to me, what exactly do they do, because I don't want to get rid of it and then need it back later on.

 

[WildCowboy]

Ok, thanks for the help. I do plan to use Garage Band, but to me getting rid of Printer Drivers sounds kind of scary to me, what exactly do they do, because I don't want to get rid of it and then need it back later on.

Printer drivers provide specific instructions to allow computers talk to printers. But because there are hundreds or thousands of printers available for which you have drivers installed on your machine, you don't need most of them. Your computer can often talk just fine to a printer even without specific drivers for that model of printer. And if you really do need the drivers at some point, they'll be available from the printer manufacturer's web site. Feel free to get rid of any drivers from printers you don't expect to use...it can save up to 2 GB. Or just leave them there for now and remember that you can delete them at some future date when you start to run out of space.

 

[Zwhaler]

Printer drivers provide specific instructions to allow computers talk to printers. But because there are hundreds or thousands of printers available for which you have drivers installed on your machine, you don't need most of them. Your computer can often talk just fine to a printer even without specific drivers for that model of printer. And if you really do need the drivers at some point, they'll be available from the printer manufacturer's web site. Feel free to get rid of any drivers from printers you don't expect to use...it can save up to 2 GB. Or just leave them there for now and remember that you can delete them at some future date when you start to run out of space.

Awesome, that really helped. Ok, so I'm basiclly set! And I do know about monolingual and other such programs, just to clairify.