Cleaning Up a MacBook Air OS 10.5.8

lippupalloA customer came to me with their MacBook Air (first Gen) with a 75GB SDD.  It only had 1GB free space on the internal HD and would not run Apple Software Updates.  Software Update would claim that there was not enough free space and 2.9GB was needed.
Monolingual removed all language files (other than English), keyboard layouts, and processor architecture.    Supposedly it not only saves HDD space but also speeds up OSX through optimization.
When running Monolingual, it is important to choose Remove on each tab (Languages, Input Menu, Architecture) individually.  When I hit Remove after choosing all languanges, but was on the Input Menu, it told me I saved 60Mb.  Wow, not great…  But then I realized if I hit remove on the Language tab, it removed about 3 GB of data from the Macintosh HD and the Monolingual app took much longer to run.  Removing architectures (all but Intel and Intel 64bit) resulted in recovering 786M of space.
This laptop is used mainly for business, but I can’t just go and delete his 30GB of iTunes library data. I do know for a fact that this customer has never once used Garage Band, iWeb, or iDVD.  Navigate Finder and delete:

  • /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/
  • /Library/Application Support/iDVD
  • /Library/Application Support/iWeb
  • Also deleted Garage Band, iWeb and iDVD from Applications.

That freed up about 4GB.  Enough to download updates for this round.
Other less than stellar tips include:

  • Safari, Clear Cache (from the Safari Menu).
  • Google Chrome, Clear Browsing Data, Obliterate Items from: “The Beginning of Time”
  • Delete contents of Downloads folder /Users/USERNAME/Downloads
  • Remove orphaned system User accounts Apple > System Preferences > Accounts > Unlock and Minus to delete > Choose “Delete the home folder”
  • Empty Trash (*duh)

Then, the real problem began to unfold itself when I start to realize that the iTunes library is spread across four different folders and two user accounts.  Manual clean up is underway.  Now I’m remembering why I ditched my iPhone for ANDROID…