Reader Bruce Bigenho is interested about the amount of loose space leave on his young MacBook ’s hard drive . He writes :
A few things here :
1 . Yes , it ’s safe to toss the printer drivers for printers you ’ll never likely apply . sail to /Library / printer and throw out the family booklet for printer you wo n’t need — Brother , Lexmark , Oce , and Sharp , for example .
2 . Even though printer ship with their own machine driver on an install disc , it ’s not a uncollectible idea to let OS X have a cracking at it first as its drivers may be more up to date ( you have no estimation how long that disc may have been sitting in the loge and that boxwood on the shelf ) . And , in some cases , an OS X number one wood is n’t included on the disc , whereas OS X has one . With that in mind , you might wish to hang on to a duo of these family folders if you cogitate you might one day buy a special brand of printer .
3 . Do n’t stop at printer . you may also remove unnecessary nomenclature resources with J. Schrier and I. Stein ’s freeMonolingual .
4 . Keep going ! I ’ve detect The Omni Group ’s $ 15OmniDiskSweepera utile tool for zeroing in on the files and bundle that nurse up huge amounts of hard driving space . ( Alternatively , you’re able to make a voguish folder that looks for files over a certain size — say a GB — and then hound down and delete those that you do n’t want . ) In your specific case it ’s unlikely that you have a forgotten gigabytes - rich iDVD or iMovie project floating around on your hard movement . But those who have had their Macs for awhile may . I just tooled around my inauguration drive and managed to delete half a XII gigabytes of information by discard just such undesirable files .
Update : Macworld ’s resident Gemologist , Dan Frakes , pipes in with a linkup to his April 19 , 2006 Mac Gems weblog “ Byte Breakdown , ” in which he covers not only OmniDiskSweeper , but a duet of other utilities that he wish better . Check it out for his take on ID - Design ’s freeWhatSizeand the just - as - freeGrandPerspective .
