Confused-- Used almost half my hard drive in 5 days

I just got my 14" Ibook G4 five days ago. I've already used 26 GB of hard drive space during this time period. I'm not familiar with mac at all and I'm wondering if this is normal? I have about 1,500 songs and not many programs have been downloaded. Is there a way that maybe I'm copying things to the hard drive without realizing it. I'm very confused.

I assume you are using itunes.. what format are you encoding into? Use apple-lostless format or MP3, etc. Did you use wave, or AVI? These formats are un-compressed and take up a lot of room.

yeah, i did the same thing. if you don't use it, get rid of GarageBand. it is a huge application and frees up space if you don't use it.

trapzilla2002 said:

yeah, i did the same thing. if you don't use it, get rid of GarageBand. it is a huge application and frees up space if you don't use it.

Click to expand...

yes, that too. Garageband takes up a ton of space beucause of all its built- in audio loops.

macEfan said:

I assume you are using itunes.. what format are you encoding into? Use apple-lostless format or MP3, etc. Did you use wave, or AVI? These formats are un-compressed and take up a lot of room.

Click to expand...

How do you specifically check what format you're incoding it to? I'm pretty sure the files (or most of them) on my windows computer were mp3's. I just got on my network and transferred the songs from my windows computer onto my mac.

Open itunes >click on edit in the top menu > click on View options > click 'kind' box on. The kind of file should now appear in the main window with song title, band name....

If they were mp3's to begin with, and you didnt convert them (you would know if you did, its not like you can do it accedentally) then they are still mp3's.

I just got my iBook too, and only have a couple gb left. I just think there is a lot in the bundled software that takes up a bunch of space

Exactly. Apple bundles ANYTHING and EVERYTHING you would ever need on the ibook. that means that with my 30Gb HD i had only 7.x left for use!

Reformat the HD. Make sure you back up everything you want. Slip the restore disks (disk 1) that came with the ibook into the drive and start the process. When it asks if you want the "regular" or "typical" instal. Say no and chose custom. Now choose ONLY the stuff YOU will actually use. If you have an HP printer for examample. choose to have only the HP drivers installed.

Yes, that ibook has EVERY DRIVER OF EVERY PRINTER MADE BY EVERY MANUFACTURER in it!!!

Get rid of things you would never use (I'm a musisian so I use garage band) but you might not.

After that it will start reformating and you will go through the disks (or DVDs)

Like I said, originally out of the box I had 7 of 30 Gb free. After this process I had 21 of 30.

Good luck!

It will also save space if you get rid of all the extra languages (or the ones you don't use). Lots of programs that will delete all the other language files.

Here is a link to one of them called Monolingual:
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

i just ran the monolingual program and it removed 120MB from my hard drive. i left about 10 languages on there as i use them almost daily.

thanks for the tip.