Why does my new MacBook have so much crap on it?
 

So I finally broke down and bought a MacBook and, so far, it's treating me quite well. It's doing everything I need it to and Leopard is clean and easy to use and all that jazz.

I have one major problem, though. I have an 80 gig hard drive in this machine, and I brought it home and checked out much open space I had. To my dismay, it said I had only 57 gigs of open space.

My OS and packaged software is taking up 23 gigs of space? What in god's name is pre-installed on this thing? Anyone know their way around a Mac well enough to tell me how to free up some of this. I'm not pushing my HD's limit (or anywhere close to it) but that's an absurd amount of stuff to be sitting on an harddrive when I pick it up from a store.

Oh, welcome to the necessary cleanup process from all the "filler" they put on any new comp these days.

IIRC, a lot of space gets taken up by international language stuff and every print driver ever created since the dawn of time.

(searches around)

Ah yes, there's a good thread here: How to make OSX a smaller install? - ehMac.ca.

Yeah, I can hook my laptop up to a friggin' dot matrix and get it to work. Thanks for that option, [brand name]!

I removed my languages and my Mac runs faster.

Erase the stuff you don't want if you feel like it.

Deleting the languages will make things run a little smoother.

ALSO, there's this great little Utility called Disk Inventory X, which displays your harddrive graphically, with the things that take up more space being bigger blocks, and smaller things, smaller blocks.

Here's a link: http://www.derlien.com/