New User to Mac..

Hi everyone,

I just bought a Macbook 2.0Ghz (switching over from PC to a MAC for the first time...kind of overwhelming!!). The first thing I noticed is that although my laptop was supposed to come with 80GB, there was only 56GB free when I first opened it. Is that...normal?! Are there just an insane number of programs installed on my computer that I'm not aware of? or does OS X just take up that much room?

...I was also wondering if someone has any good links to tips or basics for mac users. I've really never used one before, so this is all kind of crazy. I was so used to a PC and I feel like I'm learning how to use a computer from scratch. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

Note that both a filesystem and the way that sizes are calculated conspire against your disk size. The filesystem takes up part of the disk space without showing it to you, and 80GB is really more like 74.5GB as far as software is concerned in the first place, so you're seeing close to 18GB or so of used space on your drive. Some of that is also system services stuff (like the Spotlight indexing files and so on), all kinds of things. I don't think it's completely out of place.

 

Yes, there is a lot of space being used by some softwares. The good part is that they are of good quality, the bad is that not all of them are free. iLife suite takes some 10GB IIRC. Most of these are music samples for Garage Band and DVD themes. Then there is iWorks, which takes some 2-3GB as well (trial), MS Office 2003 (trial and not that big) and some other apps. If you uninstall it all you might gain some 12GB, so you can see OS X is not all that bigger than Windows.
As for the tips, read the sticky threads right here. They will provide a good start and links to more. Also Apple's site has a "Switch" series of lessons/pages intended for Switchers, you might start there as well.

 

Totally normal....after I deleted the trial off ms office I had about 94GBs from my 120GB hard drive left. Formatted max capacity was 111.45GB

 

sales types often mark disk space by the thousands, so if you divide the space in megabytes by 1000, you'll probably get 120GB. In reality, you divide by 1024, so you get a smaller number.

 

This entry at Wikipedia should help explain the whole decimal versus binary issue and why your HDD is smaller than you expected.

 

Haven't read the entry right now, but the point is that sales types are actually right. 1 Giga = 10^9, 1 Mega=10^6, 1 kilo= 10^3, and it has been so long before we started using this prefixes to index memory capacities. Having them meaning what we usually assign them in TI would foobar other areas (for example, calculate the disk capacity per square centimeter). Pity few people use Gibibytes and so on, and it is even more dreadful that OSs (all that I know of) report it incorrectly.
But, I guess the original poster is more concerned about space taken by OS X and the installed software than the ~6G(i?)B of difference.

 

Thanks for your replies re:hard drive everyone! ..and wooky, I had no idea about Apple's 'switch' lessons, so thanks for that too!

Just another question:
...does everyone here just use VLC to play their .wmv and .avi videos? ...or is there a better program to use? The guy at the apple store suggested Flip4Mac, but ....um, that's not free.

 

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/flip4macwmvstudiopro.html

Download the trial version. It is the player, plus a trial for their pay stuff. It should play all wmv though without any nagging or anything.