Revitalize, Restore, and Renew Your Mac

INSIDER RESOURCES

Special Sponsored Section

The video player requires Flash 8 Player or later. Please download the latest Flash Player.

FEATURE
100 Snow Leopard Tips, Tricks, and Features

FEATURE
OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

FEATURE
The Complete iTunes History -- SoundJam MP to iTunes 9

FEATURE
iTunes 9 Tips and Tricks - Solve the Mysteries of the New iTunes

TOP STORIES

Feature

Revitalize, Restore, and Renew Your Mac

Posted 03/15/2007 at 9:50:16pm | by Niko Coucouvanis

Be careful: Monolingual’s defaults will remove English language support.

SLIM DOWN YOUR FAT CAT OS

Your bad kitty will run faster and smoother after it sheds a few gigabytes.

A slimmer cat is a faster cat, and we’ll bet dimes to DIMMs that you can shed several gigabytes from your Mac’s hard drive without missing them. If you installed the default Mac OS 10.4, for example, you’ve got 1GB of foreign language translation support, 2.1GB of printer drivers, and 9.9GB of bundled software. Once you’ve removed the biggest offenders post facto by following the steps below, take an hour to browse your hard drive for such junk as sample or stock images in Photoshop and sample songs in GarageBand (they’re in /Users/username/Music/), and of course, scour your iTunes library for all the podcasts that you forgot you subscribed to and other unwanted audio debris. If you use iMovie or GarageBand, archive or otherwise offload old projects, which are often huge.

Applications Remove any expired demo software and any apps that you’re not likely to use—especially if you have the original installer discs. Games tend to fill loads of disk space, but only remove them as a last resort. Remember, all work and no play…

Printer Drivers The /Library/Printers folder holds hundreds of drivers that you’ll never use, and two that you might use someday—which will come with the printer and are available free at the manufacturer’s website anyway.

Application Support iLife themes from iMovie and iDVD consume virtual acres, some of which you can surely do without. Browse the themes in each app, make note of the keepers, then proceed to /Library/Application Support/ for a weed-out session. While you’re in Application Support, remove any folders for apps that you’ve deleted, and feel free to browse the remaining folders for superfluous sample projects, tutorials, and the like. Also check /Users/username/Library/Application Support for redundant items that are already in the main Application Support folder, orphaned support files, and other dead weight.

Language Support Mac OS X’s localization support is unmatched—but how many foreign languages are you ever going to use? Strip it down to your native tongue with Monolingual (free, monolingual.sourceforge.net)—just read the included directions and make sure that you don’t remove your native language. English-speaking ’Mericans should keep both English and English (United States). And if you use Adobe CS apps, open Monolingual’s Preferences and add them to the blacklist of apps that you want Monolingual to leave alone—for reasons unknown, current versions of Photoshop et al won’t run without full language support.

Bad Music The folder /Library/Audio/Apple Loops For GarageBand contains over 1GB of loops for GarageBand projects; we punted just the stuff that gives us violent urges (Club Dance Beat and so on), thereby freeing up a couple hundred megabytes.

Shared Files If you maintain a multiuser Mac, keep track of what each user installs and where. If several users tinker in GarageBand, for example, in the name of congeniality and preventing duplicates they should install any additional loops for all users rather than only for their user account. And you know they won’t unless you tell them to. Same thing goes for any application or its add-ons.

Next: PUT YOUR POWER WHERE YOU WANT IT

COMMENTS: 14

TAGS: Mac upgrade, Mac repair, Mac troubleshooting, upgrade, repair, troubleshooting, performance

COMMENTS

Great list!! Thanks,
Submitted by OsbottheRobot (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-14 18:17

Great list!! Thanks, there's a few tricks there I didn't know about. And BTW, fantastic spa pic.

Login or register to post comments

Agreed
Submitted by James (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-14 19:14

It's great to see some tricks that are new to me. Very handy piece.

Login or register to post comments

Process Wizard looks great
Submitted by Jim (not verified) on Thu, 2007-03-15 06:51

Process Wizard looks great but it doesn't run correctly on my G4 running 10.4.8. when I launch it no window opens up. Activity monitor shows it running, but nothing is on the screen or in the dock. The latest note in the instructions file that comes with it says now Jaguar compatible.

Login or register to post comments

I've seen entire books on
Submitted by SpyPlane (not verified) on Thu, 2007-03-15 13:02

I've seen entire books on this topic that didn't give as much helpful info as what you've presented here. Great stuff...thank you.

Login or register to post comments

yqqDoGvlAXhYWBwuYts
Submitted by Uioper (not verified) on Thu, 2008-06-26 06:40

comment3, milf olive galleries, lvl, ovarian masses, 312, assessments baltimore, :(, jackoff pics, 425,

Login or register to post comments

font validation
Submitted by Smitty (not verified) on Fri, 2007-03-16 08:05

"Validate Font" is found under "File", not "Edit" as described in an otherwise awesome feature article.

Login or register to post comments

useful hard drive utility
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-28 18:57

I'm surprised that you didn't mention the very useful utility Disk Inventory X, which visually represents your hard drive with blocks of proportional size and color by related type. I have used this utility to find and delete large portions of data that I never use, like World Book and some Garage Band loops and music. I would highly recommend Disk Inventory X for anyone crammed for hard drive space who doesn't know what else to delete for more space.

Login or register to post comments

amazing!
Submitted by Tom Harman (not verified) on Mon, 2007-04-02 13:04

I had been having serious problems with the fonts on my computer after i carelessly installed a ridiculous amount of them. I THOUGHT i deleted them all but still had problems but that font nuke program you linked to was amazing and everything is all fixed now! Thanks so much for being on google!

Login or register to post comments

help!
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2007-04-12 03:18

i can't seem to figure out how to do the "dock your desktop" part. where what ever you download will automatically place it in the new folder you created in the dock. it's not working for me. how do i set it as a default download location???

Login or register to post comments

Wiped out fonts
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2007-05-11 20:10

When we got to the step in FontBook where you are to remove the fonts that "errored," we used the drop-down menu to just view those few fonts. On that screen, we chose the checkbox to select all, thinking it was just going to choose those bad fonts. We hit Remove and to our dismay, ALL our fonts were removed, not just the bad ones. We recovered 13 from our Tiger system disk. Is there a way to get back all the fonts we used to have under our previous system, 10.2.8 (none were third-party)?

Login or register to post comments

Be Careful deleting various languages
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2007-10-25 09:14

I went thru my G4 Power Mac running 10.4 Tiger and deleted all the various languages I wouldn't be using and rendered Mail and iCal unusable. Luckily I could recover the files and get them going again, but they were definitely hosed after removing those "extra" files.

Login or register to post comments

the above
Submitted by james evans (not verified) on Sun, 2007-12-09 16:18

I don't see how only english or one lanuage
would limit mail or iCal. Unless you are going into area that require this. I have intell core 2 duo, 1 g ram, 74.5 g hd, 13.3" screen. I have tried to take off all "foreign" lanuages of no use to me since I don't speak or write any. It doesn't seem to bother anything. Only if the programs or users need that to function or
understand would it, on the outside, cause it not to work.

Login or register to post comments

hpsNOPeNuFdFqFITz
Submitted by Johny (not verified) on Thu, 2008-06-26 05:56

comment1, pussy hot, ezfx, trey inman and associate, =-PP, virginpartygirls, otfy, jackoff pics, 989,

Login or register to post comments

omega watches
Submitted by benet (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 18:05

Every little chat Salon 1000 ah!replica watchYou are my best's buddy bbvcb

Login or register to post comments