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Is there anything in the default Mac OS X install that you like to remove for performance, clutter, or non-use reasons?

I have done custom installs without all the extra print drivers and language support, but other than that, I find most default Mac OS X installs pretty clean cut.

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    I would suggest making this a CW since it has no definable answer Jul 17, 2009 at 19:25

5 Answers 5

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OS X as well as some of the applications come with built-in support for a ton of different (human ;-) languages that you probably don't want to use. You can remove the localization using Monolingual. On my machine Monolingual saved a total of 1.8 GB.

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    You can also use Monolingual to remove the redundant code not required by your architecture from Universal Binary (ie Intel and PPC) apps. Doing this on the average machine can double the space saving to >3Gb.
    – avstrallen
    Jul 18, 2009 at 20:33
  • I prefer XSlimmer for that. There's new version that is aware of HFS+ compression introduced in Snow Leopard.
    – Kornel
    Sep 2, 2009 at 1:25
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The two programs I remove are the Microsoft Office and iWork demos

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    You might want to run Office once to get MS fonts installed.
    – Kornel
    Sep 2, 2009 at 1:26
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That's about it, really. I wouldn't really recommended removing default applications. One thing some people do is to trim universal binaries down to just the architecture they need, commonly using Xslimmer ($12.95), but keep in mind that's also messing with important things. If you do it, at least don't do it to anything in the System folder.

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These days I don't remove anything, but back on 10.0 on my Pismo where disk space was an issue I used to remove all the extra printer drivers that got installed by default.

If you are after space I would recommend Onni disk sweeper

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I usually remove the extra Printer Drivers.

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