[How To] Easily Increase HD Free Space on Laptop

[drpmulay]

Thanks that reply was very useful

[Jacksloadedgun]

is there something like this that will deleted the special character pallete of the languages i'm not longer using?

[fryke]

There's a System Preference about languages etc. where you can turn that off. But you can't - and shouldn't - actually delete that.

[blackpuma]

This may or may not be useful, but IMHO it's a good tool to have in your bag.

In some cases I've had immediate success with Disk Inventory X. It gives a nice visual representation of what's taking up your space.

The first time I ran it, it was immediately (and shockingly) obvious how much space MP3s were consuming, so I moved them to an external drive.

In other cases, it allowed me to say, "oh, never mind." I ran it recently on my notebook and noticed that the developer tools were taking up a huge chunk of space... I want those!

[macosxuser]

I ran Monolingual 1.3.4 on my G3 iBook and it reclaimed 62MB of disk space.
It only reclaimed 62MB of disk space because I didn't select all those other languages when I originally installed OSX so I don't know if there's much point to it really.
Just don't select all those languages when installing OSX.

[Giaguara]

Actually, even if you select ONLY English while installing OS X, when you update, the system update does not respect your language choices. So when you update say from 10.4.6 which was cleaned to be an English only, it will add you the updates still in the 15 or so languages that come with the system.
Some applications updates may be 50 MB - of which if you use only English, the files you will need may be 20 MB or less.

You can delete the unused localization files from the programs manually. No matter what languages you will use, leave the languages of your choice and English.

To remove the localizations manually : select the application (make sure the application is not running), right click, select "Show Package Contents", in the window that opens, go to Contents / Resources / and you will see a lot of folders with .lproj ending. Those files contain all the localized resources. It's safe to remove the languages you know you will not be ever using, but just no matter what language you will run the system, leave English.lproj files. And the files you are interested in removing are only the .lproj folders, nothing else - all other files would injure the program. The English.lproj will assure that the project will open even if there would be problems on the other languages of your choice. (Also, if you want to make a localization for a non-existing file you e.g. start with Klingon - use the developer tools etc to translate a copy of the English.lproj to tlh.lproj file.)