I reformatted my MacBook today after finding out the default installation took up a whopping 18Gigs of space.
That doesn’t sound too bad, if you’re a windows users and are watching Vista news, but to me that was just waaaayy too much HD space to give up. Consider: 80G harddrives aren’t really 80Gs. Mine was ~74 (-6). Then the install (-18), then if you load up a standard(?) 20Gs of music (-20)… thats 44Gs used up and you’re not doing anything new. Oh, and that’s less than half your drive if you got the black MacBook with the default 80G drive vs white with 60G.
Anyhoo, here’s the saga, but in short you want to do a reinstall from scratch when you get the machine and customize the install with a fine toothed comb.
The "saga" link throws an extra http// in the url (check the address bar after clicking) and causes the page not to load. There's some good tips (though screenshots would have been nicer) there. Even with an older G5 with 160 Gb drive, I don't want to waste space. I need as much as possible for all the wedding video rendering I've been doing in Final Cut Express.
url fixed. Thanks berk!
FWIW, Monolingual does a nice job of removing the extra languages from an OSX install.