macbook HD space is kinda small.

Hi, I just got my 13 inch 60 gig macbook. i do like it a lot. I'm sorry if this should go into the macbook forum, i just felt my newbie-to-mac-products status overrode the macbook question category because of the lameness of the question...

so, i'm not sure how much actual free space is suppose to be on a macbook out of the box, but i figured it would be kind of close to 60 Gb. So, may be apple puts on lots of stuff on their HD before shipping out and the functional space is less? but i was surprised by how little (36 GB) was actually on the HD. can other macbook users tell me if this is normal for them? If so, I can stop my complaining and settle with the amount of space given to me.

thanks

I custom-reinstalled my macbook right after i got it. You can leave out:
-support for additional languages
-additional printer drivers
-additional fonts
-demo versions of office & iwork

and that will save quite a bit of space.

Then run Monolingual (http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/) to free up even more space...

also if you don't plan on using garageband anytime soon then you can get some space back by trashing the sound samples that come with it.

Re-install OS X from the CDs, and do a custom install, and you will see a MAJOR difference in space left. Just uncheck anything you won't be using, such as demos, apps, etc. I cut my install down to about 5-10 gigs, but that's about as small as it can get.

Ha, it's ironic the way apple has that new pc vs. mac commercial and before doing anything out of the box, the pc needs to "erase all of that trial software that came on [his] hard drive." I had a similar experience when I bought an iBook with a bunch of unnecessary junk installed.

I've noticed it with the new Intel Core Duo's...compared to my Mac Mini (Power PC)...your HDD "Out of the Box" is less...even the 20" iMac Intel Core Duo...I'm down to 200GB....I can't believe I used up 50GB already.

It doesn't help if you want to run BootCamp/XP...I'm now thinking of get an External HDD...300GB Maxtor One Touch III for $229 CAN at Costco

Yeah it really is crazy my 17 in Pb has a 120 Gb hardrive I only had about 100 available !

Yes, the Mac system files do take up lots of space, but many of the Mac files, such as Office files, are smaller when made on a Mac, as opposed to a PC.
But I agree, I couldn't use my iBook G4 out of the box, there were many things to be dealt with, like deleting useless trials, installing security software, and a few updates.

What are these USELESS TRIALS people keep talking about? iLife? If so, iLife is far from useless. The only two things I can think of are Microsoft Office and iWork. both can be removed as quickly as throwing them in the trash and hitting empty. And they DO NOT have to be removed to use the Mac. They don't Slow the system down like what is installed on a lot of the name brand PC's you get these days! You can even bypass the OS updates till later but it's good to get them. And there is no security software required for the Mac.

Like DevilBoy says over and over, Stop treating OSX like it's Windows. It's not.

dtravis7 said:

What are these USELESS TRIALS people keep talking about? iLife? If so, iLife is far from useless. The only two things I can think of are Microsoft Office and iWork. both can be removed as quickly as throwing them in the trash and hitting empty. And they DO NOT have to be removed to use the Mac. Thbey don't Slow the system down like what is installed on a lot of the name brand PC's you get these days! You can even bypass the OS updates till later but it's good to get them. And there is no security software required for the Mac.

Like DevilBoy says over and over, Stop treating OSX like it's Windows. It's not.

Click to expand...

you forgot quicken...

and we're not complaining that it slows the system down. We're just saying that some of us need more hard drive space and basic OS X takes up more than it should. ****, out of a 160 GB internal on my Intel iMac 17", I used up 45 gigs alone on music. plus apps. Some of us need space that's being taken up by useless crap we're not going to use.

that's all we're saying.

The problem is always the classic laptop tradeoff of power vs power: the electrical power the machine consumes vs. the computing power it delivers to you. Laptops pretty much universally (not just Macs) come with smaller, slower revving hard drives in order to limit the amount of electrical power (hence battery life) they consume. This can leave you a little worried about the amount of hard drive space you have left when your "out of the box" config uses a third of the total space available! Remember though, you can always attach more storage via USB/Firewire drives. This is likely the best solution. You can probably identify lots of large size data that you could keep on a secondary drive in order to minimize the needs of your boot volume.

Oh yeah, and per Super_boy22, get a floppy - according to him it must have 30 or more GB on it!! :spook:

mac57 said:

Oh yeah, and per Super_boy22, get a floppy - according to him it must have 30 or more GB on it!! :spook:

Click to expand...

but I can store many dvds on a floppy so its essential to me!

but yes, I have a Maxtor 100GB External hard drive, it works flawlessly, but I heard that Maxtors actually have problems after a year or so so I plan to get a LaCie or Seagate or maybe even Western Digital...