New iBook Hard Drive

I just bought a new 12" iBook and the hard drive is advertised as 40GB. I know when you buy a computer, the hard drive actually comes with less GB than advertised after the software is installed. However, my 40GB iBook only came with 24GB of free storage space. 16GB of hard drive space seems like a lot for preinstalled software. Is this normal on MACs or did I somehow get a 30 GB hard drive?

Does this mean the old 30GB iBooks only came with 14GB of free storage space? That really seems low to me...

MAC_Daddy said:

I just bought a new 12" iBook and the hard drive is advertised as 40GB. I know when you buy a computer, the hard drive actually comes with less GB than advertised after the software is installed. However, my 40GB iBook only came with 24GB of free storage space. 16GB of hard drive space seems like a lot for preinstalled software. Is this normal on MACs or did I somehow get a 30 GB hard drive?

Does this mean the old 30GB iBooks only came with 14GB of free storage space? That really seems low to me...

Click to expand...

Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility

Click on the hard drive (it may be called Macintosh HD) and look at the bottom of the window. It will tell you what the capacity is, what's available, and what's used. This will tell you if you got the right hard drive.

Did you buy this from Apple or from a reseller?

caribiner23 said:

Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility

Click on the hard drive (it may be called Macintosh HD) and look at the bottom of the window. It will tell you what the capacity is, what's available, and what's used. This will tell you if you got the right hard drive.

Did you buy this from Apple or from a reseller?

Click to expand...

I bought my computer from the Apple Store. I did what you said and it says the capacity of my hard drive is 37.1 GB. Is it normal to have 14 GB taken up on preinstalled software though?

yeah.. i have around that taken up of pre installed software

That sounds about right. Can you give us a quick rundown of what apps are on the machine? Have you loaded any songs in iTunes or pictures in iPhoto? Or is this right out of the box?

One way of clearing space is to run Delocalizer, which will remove all the non-US-English language information from your iBook. You'll regain almost 2 GB by running this. (You can keep the regional features that you are interested in, e.g. UK-English.)

I also realize I took you the long way around for the disk information. You could do this, too:

Open Finder, right-click (or control-click) your hard drive (likely called Macintosh HD). Choose "Get Info."

Is it possible to get rid of OS 9 to free up space?

If you don't have any OS 9 applications, then just drop the OS 9 system folder in the trash.