How to Free up Space on Your Macintosh Computer

Steps

1. Open Macintosh HD and go to Movies. Find anything that seemed cool and funny at the time but is now just a waste of needed space. Videos take up a lot of what you need. Move any unwanted videos to Trash.
2. Go into Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows or Movies. These are your iTunes movie files, and if you got them from YouTube or another video site, they take up space. This is because they are not compressed as they would be if you bought them from iTunes. Don't forget to go into iTunes and delete the files from there too! (Be careful that you don't delete files you want)
3. Delete files from previous years. For example, photos or videos of you messing around, or just old word documents.
4. Delete localization files. Many programs that you install will automatically place large foreign language help files on your computer for international users. Downloading and running a program such as DeLocalizer will sometimes free up a gigabyte or more of hard drive space. DeLocalizer allows you to select which language files to keep and which to trash.
5. Delete your browsing history in Safari or Firefox.
6. Check to see if you are running Leopard. Which means unless you truly depend on it, delete your past items (from the Finder window, where it says search for: today, yesterday...etc.)
7. Clear out any cached files that you may have. This is simple in Safari with Cmd-Opt-E, for all other applications you can use cleaner apps such as Maintenance or TidyUp. Or just look in Macintosh HD/Users/(your name)/Library/Caches.
8. Open Finder and click on Applications. Scour this folder for any applications that you don't use, and delete them with an application that removes all the related folders elsewhere on the hard drive. A good example is AppDelete.
9. Get rid of all the locked files that are hanging around in your Trash that refuse to be deleted.
10. If you have a second hard drive with a lot of space, change that hard drive that has lots of space over to your main drive. This will extremely boost your space.

Tips

• Don't forget to empty your trash!

Warnings

• Be careful not to delete essential programs or files.
• Don't change your hard drive if you want to keep all your good files.
• DO NOT reformat the disk, otherwise you'll lose all your data.

Things You'll Need

• Macintosh G4 or higher running Mac OS 10.4 or higher

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