If you don’t regularly clean-up your start-up disk your system runs slowly, won’t be able to run big applications like Final Cut Pro and won’t be able to download files.
There are lots of techie solutions online, but here’s the easy version for you and me:
How do I know how much space there is?
Go to Finder > Macintosh HD then press cmd-i
1. Empty the Trash
Go to Finder > Secure Empty Trash
Then make a cup of tea cos it’ll probably take a while.
2. Go Monolingual
When you click Easy Set-up it’ll download an application in up to 200 languages (otherwise known as Localisation files). Unless you speak all 200 languages, it’s worth while getting rid of the ones that are just sitting there using up space.
Incidentally, if you can speak that many languages… that’s amazing and I’d be very interested to hear from you…
3. Uninstall unused applications
Get rid of everything you don’t need by going to Macintosh HD > Applications then right click > Move to Trash
Don’t forget to Secure Empty Trash again!
4. Old iTunes and iPhoto Versions
These take up a lot of space, especially since everytime you download the latest version, it saves the old version.
For more info, see your Mac OS X file.
If you’ve got any helpful hints for how to free start-up disk space without needing to be a computer genius, please let us know in the comments wall below!
Fiona Marley Paterson 