Apple just updated there Macbook’s and Macbook Pro’s. I would love to get rid of my current 2.0GHZ intel core duo MacBook and upgrade to the newly upgrade MacBook pro, but it just does not fit in my budget. We would all love a new computer right; more HD space, more ram to work with, and the feel of it running faster. Everybody would love that, but for some people, like myself, it just is not in the budget. So I thought I would take the time, and just revive my mac. Try to make it as good as new.

This will be a 3 part series. Today I am going to focus on creating more HD space and clearing out some applications that eat up our ram, giving us more ram to work with.

Deleting Applications

A lot of our space that is being taken up is from our applications. Many of us have applications that unused. Just sitting there taking up our space. Before I started sorting through my applications, I had 55 applications.

I tried to delete all the applications that I don’t use or were unnecessary to have. After I deleted all of these, I had about 38 left, so I deleted 17 applications. Of these 38 applications I have, 28 came pre-installed onto my mac, So I only have 10 extra applications that I downloaded that i still use.

Going through iTunes and iPhoto

Admit it, we all of songs we don’t listen to, we all have photo’s we never look at. So delete them. iTunes is really simple, you can do it the hard way by going through all of them or you can do the easy way what I did. I went through my itunes, and I sorted it by song count. If there was a song that had been played once or less, I deleted it. This gave me about a few hundred more MB to work with. I then went through my TV shows and Movies for the one’s that I don’t think I am going to watch very often. This gave me a few more MB to work with as well.

I have a huge iPhoto library. Over 4000 to be exact, so I went through really fast and deleted a lot of my duplicates and ones that I do not need. I deleted over a 1000. This gave me about another GB to work with. So you can be surprised how much space your iTunes and iPhoto take up.

Documents and Movies

If your a movie fanatic like myself, chances are you got a lot of movies stored on your HD. If this movie was a rip from a DVD, delete it, you can just watch it off the DVD. If there’s a few movies that you don’t want to delete, burn them all to a DVD. Movies are a HD sucker, they take up so much space.
Now, go through your documents and do pretty much the same thing. Delete everything your are no longer going to need. If there is a a document in there that you regular use keep it in there. Then if there is a document that you do not use very often but you think you will need in the future, burn it to a CD so you can use it later.

Removing Widgets

We all love widgets right, they can do cool things. Well they take up a lot of ram, don’t ask me I do not know why. Look at the picture up above, 46MB of Free Ram. That’s not a lot. What if I want to edit some videos or something like that. Well the only thing to do is get more free ram. So just by deleting some widgets, closing some programs that are always open, I managed to gain about 150MB more of ram.

Well, after doing all of this, I increased my Hard Drive from 5GB to 20GB (at the moment I am currently burning a very large DVD so I expect about 15 - 20 more GB when it is finished) and gave myself a boost of 150MB of ram. Check back tomorrow for part 2 on reviving your Mac.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any other ways of creating more space on your Hard Drive?