05-11-2007, 03:23 PM

Hey newbie here with what probably sounds like typically newbie question. I've taken the plunge and switched got a brand new MacBook Pro today very pleased so far! However, when i was looking through the hard drive i noticed the available is 94 gig but on the box it says my hard drive is 120 gig. I understand the software the unit ships with will take up some space but surely not this much? Has anyone else had this problem?

Any help would be much appreciated.

05-11-2007, 04:04 PM

It can be due to couple of reasons.
1) Hard drive manufacturer advertise 1,000,000,000 bytes per gigabyte. But in proper definition in one GB, you have 1,073,741,824 bytes.

2) It could be the non-formatted capacity. (Non-formatted capacity is higher than the formatted capacity)

3) OS X takes up couple of gigs.

4) OS X also allocate some space for the virtual memory(5-10 GB).

05-12-2007, 05:48 AM

94 GB free space on a new MBP with the 120GB drive is correct.
The 120GB drive (read #1 from novicew above) will be shown as 114 GB as shown by your computer after formatting.
The MBP's ship with 20GB of stuff installed.
You can delete the trial programs that ship with it to free up some more space if you will not use them. Forget what they all are now, but MS Office is one of them.

05-12-2007, 11:27 AM

Ok thanks novicew & bobtomay for the help very useful for a newbie like myself! I'll have a look through my drive and see if i can free up some space.

05-12-2007, 11:56 PM

Get rid of all your garage band loops and I think Idvd also has them or Imovie or whatever. IMO there are a few GIG of things nobody would ever use bundled in. In my case I deleted Garageband, Imovie, Iweb and the languages I didn't need. Although I don't need every printer driver on the planet I left those on because maybe I would use them in the future.

I was delighted the first time I hooked my Mac up to my printer that it didn't need the install disc or anything. On the other hand I later realized that for things to "just work" there is a cost in terms of your hard drive. Imagine my shock when i realized black magic wasn't part of the software technology of OS X.

If you are completely new to Mac maybe use it for awhile and wait and see what you will use. After that get diskinventory and other programs to remove some bloat. You can remove just about anything you want from a Mac so be careful what you delete as you may regret it later. I would recommend waiting and using your Mac until the space becomes an issue and then go through it and see what you don't want.

I am fairly new to OS X myself so if anybody gives me negative rep for what I suggested here I would appreciate it if they could at least tell me how I went astray with my advice. Most often I wait for more knowledgable users to chirp in and am a bit gun shy to post.

05-13-2007, 05:50 AM

Thanks for the advice it's all appreciated. As i am a complete novice on Macs i'll leave it for a while to see what programs i do and don't use. I don't want to jump in head first deleting everything in sight only to find out 6 months down the line i need it!

05-13-2007, 09:07 AM

Originally Posted by bobtomay

94 GB free space on a new MBP with the 120GB drive is correct.
The 120GB drive (read #1 from novicew above) will be shown as 114 GB as shown by your computer after formatting.
The MBP's ship with 20GB of stuff installed.
You can delete the trial programs that ship with it to free up some more space if you will not use them. Forget what they all are now, but MS Office is one of them.

Don't forget delocalizer can get rid of the unused languages and drivers. Most people recover 4-6 GB just by removing this added stuff.

05-13-2007, 02:49 PM

Originally Posted by wytwolf

Don't forget delocalizer can get rid of the unused languages and drivers. Most people recover 4-6 GB just by removing this added stuff.

Delocalizer is seconded here, just DON'T USE THE ARCHITECTURE TAB. If you remove the PPC architectures from OSX, Rosetta won't be able to run any non-Universal Binary applications.

Just make sure that you keep English (assuming you are going to use English) and any other languages you want to use, otherwise you will boot to find OSX in Swedish or something.

05-13-2007, 02:55 PM

I agree with the above users about delocalizer and monolingual, but I would suggest that you use that new Mac for a while before you start throwing stuff out. It isn't like Windows, you can have programs, utilities, printer drivers and stuff that are not using processing horsepower. Since the machine is new you have plenty of empty space, so don't rush into trashing stuff yet! Just sayin'.