Mac laptops don’t come with the biggest hard drives in the world. No laptops to, but Macs are hanging in there in the lower end of what’s standard for a notebook, particularly within their price range. A standard MacBook starts at 250GB, which is up from the 120GB drive that shipped last year. The MacBook Air only boasts a 120GB drive, because it’s a piece of cardboard. The Pro has either a 160 or 250GB drive, which still isn’t a lot for an otherwise super powerful laptop.
Quite simply, every GB of space on your laptop counts. I have two external drives that get hooked up to mine because of the quantity of work I do, and the insufficient space available on the internal drive. It’s always pushing the limit, and that is without any media, games, or other files that aren’t related to work. So what’s a boy (or girl) to do? Is there any way to free up some space when you don’t have any data to sacrifice?
You bet.
Starting out, I had 21.6GB free on my MacBook. That could disappear pretty quickly if I were editing some sounds or putting together a video, which I do often on my MacBook. Let’s get some space back, shall we?
The solution: Grab Monolingual (http://monolingual.sourceforge.net) and minimize Leopard’s footprint. It’s a snappy little free program that uber geeks hold as a golden secret for saving space on their Macs by eliminating needless material installed by the OS. There’s all sorts of compatibility stuff installed with Leopard, and most of it never gets used. Lots of languages and architectures that the majority of the – here it comes – monolingual society never needs to use. It’s all about making the software work in lots of regions. But guess what? You bought your computer in your region, and use it in your region, so who cares about all that other stuff?
The best part is that running Monolingual is fairly automated. When you boot it up, you get a list of all the languages installed in your machine. You don’t know all these languages. Not even the Pope does. Select all the ones you want to get rid of. I put a check next to all of them, aside from Spanish, German and French – only because someday in my life, I plan to learn those. I’m certain this computer will be dead and gone long before I spend the time actually doing so, but you never know.
The Mac is designed so that the entire interface, including menus, help files, and everything else, can be displayed in basically any language. You can switch them in System Preferences. But, and don’t take this personally because I know you’re a super smart and talented person, I know you don’t have a need for all those languages. This is valuable space being wasted.
You may notice that English has a bunch of versions (UK, Australian, Canadian, etc.). I’d leave those all in-tact as well, just because you never know what they’re influencing.
Then you’re able to remove different input menus on the second tab. You don’t need to know Korean inputs, most likely. Deleting these input menus won’t give you much space back, but what the heck? If you don’t need them, you don’t need them.
Your computer also carries many architectures for other types of machines, which you can see under the third tab. They’ll go all the way back to G3 PowerPC architectures, even though you’re running a new Intel machine. Macs haven’t been PowerPC-based in years. That’s like keeping the engine of your 1987 Ford Taurus station wagon in the trunk of your 2008 Subaru Outback – useless.
The reason these architectures still exist are because many Apple apps are universal binaries written for both PowerPC and Intel. In other words, there’s double the code sitting around to accomplish the same goal. Your Mac, however, is flat out never going to use the PowerPC code. It wouldn’t know how if it wanted to. The code is only in there for those who installed Leopard on an old PowerPC machine. You can safely tell Monolingual to eliminate every architecture aside from Intel and Intel 64bit, thus wiping out any PowerPC code within your system that is just eating up space.
Oh, and if you have any PowerPC legacy/Rosetta software, it won’t be harmed. Monolingual is no dummy.
Before you actually start your deletion party, go into preferences and add exceptions for Microsoft Word, Adobe Creative Suite and anything else you may use that might malfunction if the languages are messed with. Monolingual won’t delete the language stuff from these applications and should allow them to function normally, while still removing the data from everywhere else.
Then, you click remove. All this deletion could have been done manually – but aren’t you glad it’s not? Note that you will have to do three deletions. If you’re on the language screen, clicking Remove will only remove the languages – not everything you have checked in all three menus. So, you’ll have to do a separate removal for each tab in Monolingual.
Monolingual isn’t in any hurry to get the job done. You’re going to wait a while for it to finish its process. But, as you wait, you can at least rejoice in knowing that every second it keeps working is more hard drive space you are gaining back. The time will fluctuate based on your own machine, but expect a good 30 minutes or so for the language removal, and then additional time for the architectures. The input menus only take a few seconds.
When completed, I recovered 3.0GB by deleting the languages, and 2.1GB by deleting the architectures. An extra 55MB was gained by removing the unneeded input menus. That’s a total of 5.1GB back in action. Not too shabby.
If you’ve invested in, or are considering upgrading to Snow Leopard, you may have noticed it is a much slimmer OS, taking up less space on your drive. 7GB less, according to Apple. This is partly because of the above already being done (no PowerPC support for Snow Leopard), additional code compression, and because of Apple deciding to use the layman’s 1,000MB calculation for 1GB instead of the actual 1,024MB (which is really just a presentation thing that doesn’t actually have real impact).
As useful as my extra 1TB worth of hard drives I connect to my laptop can be, they can’t always come with me. When I’m on the go or working outside the house, I’m left only with the measly 120GB (11GB usable) hard drive that exists within my white MacBook. That’s not a lot of room to move, and it’s obvious that every bit counts. Hard drive space is always increasing and getting bigger, but so are our demands, as the space needed for our files, tasks and projects parallel the growth of the drive. It’s only logical to do anything one can to free up as much space as possible and work more efficiently.
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