Apple Cleaning Up Apple Disk Space

Hi,

I brought myself a MacBook, about 2 years ago now (and it was the first Mac I had used), I am slowly becomming familiar with it, although I still have a windows Desktop, so I don't use my Mac everyday...

Anyway I have recently been getting a message on the screen warning me that I am running out of disk space which is affecting the startup disk, and I do only have about 200Mb of hard drive space left (its got a 60Gb Hard Drive)

Now I know the operating system takes up quite a lot of space, and I have a reasonable size music and photo folder, however I was thinking the other day, on my windows machine clean it up every now and then removing loads of temp files and folders which always seems to free up a lot of space, and uninstalling old programs I no longer need / use. Where as I have not done anything like that on my Mac ever, so it probabily has 2 years worth of crap in it, possibly taking up quite a bit of space.

Now as I don't have the most in-depth knowledge of a Mac I could be barking up the wrong tree here, however I was wondering if this is a posibiity and if any of you guys had any suggestions for how to clean it up and do a bit of basic house keeping on my hard disk. (If you happen to know of any web-guides then that would be amazing, as I would be able to follow them easily).


Thanks.

 

I recently cleaned my dads mac by doing the following:

1. Remove any unnecessary Apps using AppCleaner.
2. Install Disk Inventory X to see what's taking up valuable disk space, then remove them.
3. Install Onyx which allows you to automatically run all of the needed maintenance scripts and optimize your system

It's worth mentioning that it's sometimes easier to just reinstall the OS then restore needed files and folders.

 

Thanks for the reply, I shall have a look at the apps you suggested, was what I was looking for, cheers, yes I am aware it can often be easier just to do a re-install, but for the moment I think I shall just try giving it a clean up, and if that don't do too much I have been temped to re-install and pop in a larger hard drive.

 

If you don't find anything major that's just eating space with disk inventory x (sounds to me like you won't), then you might simply need a bigger hard drive. It's pretty bad for performance to not have a few gigs at least free for swap files. Luckily, it is crazy simple to swap a hard drive on a macbook (and most other newish pc laptops), and a decent hard drive shouldn't set you back more than 100 bucks (whatever that is in UK-land). The trickiest part is getting your old data to your new hard drive, you need a large external drive or a sata>usb caddy for the one you're taking out. Then you can simply copy your old partition right to your new drive, no reinstall required.

 

Thank you, thank you very much for those.