HD space

OK, this is probably me being a little retentive, and if it is feel free to tell me. On my old PC I quite regularly defragged, disk cleaned up and ccleanered my system, I think it just made me feel better. Now when I had a good amount of programmes installed on my 25gb hard drive (I may have some of the terminology wrong) I rarely got about 40-45% of the drive being used, and for some reason only felt happy when 60% was free [I know there's whole articles on never using your computer to it's full potential]
So I've just downloaded a widget that gives you all the stats on your computer. And mine says that out of my 40gb hard drive 15bg is already in use. That seems a lot to say I've only got the basic package it came with so far and have even deleted all the stuff I know I'm not going to use iPhoto, and other stuff from that iLife range.
Does this seem right? Are there any big programmes that take up space?
I've kept iWeb and Garage band, and have installed Microsoft word:mac and Adobe Photoshop cs2, but they were on my PC and that never seemed to have lost much space.
If I'm being retentive let me know, but I really am currently just trying to get this thing down to the elements I think I'll need. I know if I mess up I can just reinstall it all and try again. neye:

A nephew wants to get an Intel iBook (whatever it will be called) when they come out, and I uged him not to get the 40-gig model if it's offered because of the glop making up the system's overhead. How large is the drive in the PC?

Brown Study said:

A nephew wants to get an Intel iBook (whatever it will be called) when they come out, and I uged him not to get the 40-gig model if it's offered because of the glop making up the system's overhead. How large is the drive in the PC?

Click to expand...

The one that I never want to let drop below 60% has a hard drive of about 25gb (I think it might actually be 20gb) and it has a few more programmes on it than this Mac, but then I really don't know the ins and out of this thing yet anyway.

Yea this seems normal to me. After recently installing OSX and all the programs that came with it i had about 10 gigs of hard drive space already taken up. Garage band has a lot of plug ins and whatnot that take up quite a bit of space..Something like 2 gigs. Check out this awesome program called Omnidisksweep and you can see a lot of information about your drive and what is taking up space on it.

I'm not completely familiar w/ what the standard OS install takes up, but I can tell you that Adobe CS2 and MS Office are by no means easy on space. That would easily be 2GB right there, if not more.

A LOT of that is OS X. As a matter of fact, i believe OS X takes up 15 gigs! The fix to that problem is simple:

When you install OS X (the installation disc should have OS X Tiger on it), choose a custom installation and uncheck anything you think (or know) you won't need. By getting rid of Microsoft Office Test Drive and a LOAD of other stuff I wouldn't need, I cut my installation down to 10 gigs!

Oh for gods sake Please feel free to smack my forehead, I've just done it myself.
I've sat down at work today and decieded to potter through all my files that I've transfered from my old computer to get them in order. There's only about a dozen video podcasts from 'Photoshop TV' and two weekends worth of high res photo's hidden away too. No wonder so much space was being used up. Idiot that I am.
It's now gained 3gb for removing all that to my portable hard drive. Now I'll have a look at the rest of the rammel.
Thanks for all your help anyway, it's given me a lot to think about.

I just got myself a 24 inch Imac with 1 TB hard drive but it says capacity is only 931.2 GB available 920.4 GB used 10.8 GB I thought I would have close to 1000 GB what gives here.

the skinner:

Since storage medium works on base 16 (8 biys in a byte and so forth on hard drive sectors), you'll never really get what's advertised, and the discrepancies become wayyy more noticeable as you increase the capacity. I just got myself a 250GB external HDD and the formatted space was 232 GB. It's just that people round and stuff. They shouldn't but they do and really, it's no biggie, just so long as you're aware of your free space you can adjust accordingly

Dave

Have to remember that disks not only contain operating systems and files, they also contain the necessary disk formating systems to store your files depending on the way your OS organizes stored information in the form of allocated blocks of space. Not all the space gets used.

Side Question...

WolfsBane said:

Have to remember that disks not only contain operating systems and files, they also contain the necessary disk formating systems to store your files depending on the way your OS organizes stored information in the form of allocated blocks of space. Not all the space gets used.

Click to expand...

How are you guys making those really cool banners that go in your signatures?

They are called userbars. You can google the word and access several sites where you can download a variety of them.