Getting ready for my MacBook Mini

While I wait for Dell to ship my Dell Mini 9, I did the only thing I can do: pretend. Borrowing an idle Mac Mini, I installed, updated, and trimmed OS X to see how much breathing room I’ll have on the 16G SSD. I’ll put my process here for my own reference when I do it again for real but also for anyone who might come by and is curious.

  1. Formatted SSD as 16G HFS+ partition. I’m not sure what the actual size of the SSD will be (I’ve heard ~13G usable)
  2. Installed 10.5.4 with everything option turned off
  3. Did initial set-up and let Spotlight build initial search index
    7.92G Used, 8.08G Free
  4. Installed available updates:
    • Remote Desktop Client Update 3.2.2
    • QuickTime 7.6
    • iTunes 8.1
    • Java For Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 1.0
    • Mac OS X Update Combined 10.5.6

    Reboot: 7.23G Used, 8.77G Free

  5. Installed Firefox 3.0
  6. Using AppZapper (running from a flash drive), I deleted the following apps:
    • Automator
    • Chess
    • DVD Player
    • Font Book
    • iSync
    • AirPort Utility
    • Audio MIDI Setup
    • Boot Camp Assistant
    • ColorSync Utility
    • Migration Assistant
    • ODBC Administrator
    • Podcast Capture
    • RAID Utility
    • Remote Install Mac OS X
    • VoiceOver Utility

    7.15G Used, 8.85G Free

  7. Installed available updates:
    • iLife Support
    • AirPort Client Update 2009-001 1.0
    • Front Row Update 2.1.7
    • Safari 3.2.1
    • Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 3 1.0
    • Security Update 2009-001

    Reboot: 7.6G Used, 8.4G Free

  8. Ran Monolingual and removed all languages except English and English (United States)
    Reboot: 6.09G Used, 9.91G Free
  9. Ran Monolingual and removed all Input Menu languages
    6.04G Used, 9.96G Free
  10. Using Monolingual removed all architectures other than Intel
    Reboot: 5.97G Used, 10.03 G Free

Of course, I can dig through /System and /Library to find others but I don’t think the gain would be great and I’m happy with having 8-10G free considering I can easily get a 8G SD flash card for additional storage.

One thought on “Getting ready for my MacBook Mini

  1. ” I can dig through /System and /Library to find others but I don’t think the gain would be great”

    I think OmniDiskSweeper would tell you in about a minute that a good 30% is stuff like the Japanese language analysis dictionaries and multiple Java VMs that are probably superfluous for you. On a netbook you surely need only the current JVM. If you have iLife, then the Garage Band loops and the iDVD themes are huge, and again probably not important to you.

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