Delete unnecessary files on OSX 10.5 hard drive

Hi there,
My machine has been running very slowly as of late, and I recently decided to take action and start cleaning up my hard drive. I went through my documents and downloads and deleted a lot from there, but the difference in performance was very minimal. I went into the hard drive and looked in the library and there seemed to be A LOT of files which I do not know what they are. Some of them take up a lot of space, but I did not want to delete them since I don't know what they are.

Other than documents and downloads, what other files can I delete without being worried of deleting any important system files? If I set up a genius appointment at an apple store, would they be able to go through my whole hard drive and guide me through which files are needed for the system to run? Thanks in advance and I really do appreciate any advice given.

Daniel Alboukrek

Well, first off, how much free space do you have? How much ram do you have?

Hi Interregnum,
I have a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. My hard drive's capacity is 185.99 GB and I have used 53.54 GB (meaning I still have 132.45 GB available).

Daniel Alboukrek

Free space is not the issue then. What are you running, how is it running slowly etc?

Well, I guess it is not running really slow, it's just that the faster the better, and deleting unnecessary files can make it faster. It is certainly usable right now, but I would like to make it as fast as possible. If I bring in my machine to the genius bar, would they be willing to go through my whole hard drive and guide me through which files are needed for the system to run? I know it can be a very long process, and that is why I want to make sure they are willing to do it before I set up an appointment.

maclover101 said:

If I bring in my machine to the genius bar, would they be willing to go through my whole hard drive and guide me through which files are needed for the system to run?

Click to expand...

Maybe but I can, with good confidence, tell you that they'll probably say that you should only mess with files in your user directory and even then, you should probably avoid messing with the Library folder (both the user and system one). The only exception would be the /Applications folder.

Happy deleting, Five ways to slim down your Mac OS X install

Just don't come whining to me once your Mac refuses to boot, slows down to a crawl, etc. Because I take no responsibility what happens to your Mac once you open the link above.

Don't remove the languages and PowerPC code - you're asking for trouble if you do that. Removing those will likely cause you issues down the road.

maclover101 said:

Well, I guess it is not running really slow, it's just that the faster the better, and deleting unnecessary files can make it faster.

Click to expand...

The above is very flawed logic that is carried over from the Windows world (where it is not flawed logic). You're on a Mac now.

Unless the hard drive is full, the above statement simply isn't true.

The path you are on will lead to data loss. I'm all for cleaning up your user folder of stuff you don't want anymore, but beyond that nothing else should be tampered with unless you know what you're doing.

Being an old fart novice I can only recommend what I would do safely. Using Firefox, Safari or whatever browser you are using clear your history. Empty your cache. I don't think you have anything to lose that way. If you haven't done this recently, or never do this routinely, you might have a whole bunch of junk slowing you down.