Put Leopard on a diet while waiting for Snow Leopard to be released

In the same vein as Grand Perspective and WhatIsIt, I always fall back on the free app JDiskReport. Java program that scans your file structure and gives you great options to order various folders by size etc so you can track down wasted space and zap the appropriatre files. Even has retty pie charts and bar graphs to show you where its all going.

The only thing it lacks that WhatSize (pay app) provides is a way to delete the files from within the app itself. You need Finder to nav and delete from.

FYI that WhatSize is in the MacUpdate Winter Promo bundle right now, for just a few more days.

Be careful if you are using Xslimmer or other programs that remove some of the international language files, or PPC binaries. I did this a while back and had loads of trouble with Adobe apps like Photoshop, which apparently require all of the language files to actually function properly.

Just got that new Intel X25 SSD. Sped up my computer by an order of magnitude (10X!) so I'd definitely recommend it. Downside is its only 80 gigs.

So this tip is a huge help. Just installed and ran both monolingual and xslimmer and got an additional 5 gigs of space.

I got so used to only having 70 GB with my old PowerBook, and bought a HD for extra stuff, when I bought my MacBook Pro with 250 GB, I suddenly have a lot of room, and even now I have more free space than I had space on my PowerBook, so I think I am good for awhile. :-) My Time Capsule also helps out quite a bit. I think I will do some of this stuff though, get it back to more that 100 GB free space would be nice.

I'm a little confused. What has this got to do with Snow Leopard?

Just one note of warning re. Monolingual -- don't use it on Microsoft Office, or subsequent updates and packages may not install.

I noticed with interest and some trepidation that there appear to be some serious problems with G5's and Leopard. My personal experience has been that Time Machine and MobileMe are running constantly and I am experiencing serious performance hits. I have tried to reduce the performance hits by excluding the three /Cache/ folders on my system, but TM and MM still seem to be running constantly. They didn't do this when I first upgraded to 10.5.5.

I have seen others that have posted on various fora with similar problems, but no real solutions seem to be at hand. I may consider trying Xslimmer, but in reality, this is an Apple issue. My G5 is clearly within the recommended parameters for Leopard, and yet I don't see any attempts by Apple to deal with this issue.

Actually, the biggest offender for unused disk space that I've seen aside from language and font support is in the printer drivers category. Pull out printer drivers from manufacturers who don't make printers you own or use, and suddenly you have about 2GB of new space, if not more.
Or, you should do what any Mac user should be doing in the first place: not using the factory-imaged OSs on new hard drives, which I'm sure are responsible for about 25-50% of serious software issues, and doing a custom erase & install on a new computer to purge this useless data from the get-go.

I HIGHLY recommend Monolingual. It was on of the first things I did when I bought my late 2007 black MacBook. It freed up a little over gig of space.

Swapping a HD is one of those things I absolutely dread in windows and find so easy in os x.

I do wish that some of the operating system extras (languages, obscure drivers) could be removed and easily restored online without the install disk. Bewarevwhat you delete from os x as it is often not easy to get back