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2 Days with the Air

rgbuice - 06:54am Feb 6, 2008 PST

I have finished my first two days with the Air. I was excited to learn that Apple would finally have a sub notebook as I have mulitple desktops and need something portable. My 15" Macbook Pro was simply too big to be useful and when on the go I need a notebook to disappear, I don't need it have lots of ports and certainly not a CD drive (I don't know what I am going to do about Rosetta Stone's insane DRM though).

I was extremely disappointed when I found out how big it was. I have always thought footprint was more important than weight or thickness. I have been surprised to find that the notebook does slide into my daily motions fairly easily. So having the too big screen and keyboard may work out OK.

I am accustomed to having TB of disk space so I am having a little trouble coping with the 64Gb SSD. I thought it would be OK, but then I realized that the preinstalled stuff takes 30G. I have already eliminated the language localizations (1.6G) however I sure would like to reduce the OS footprint more if possible. Any suggestions?

The shiny screen sucks. I have had a lot of mac notebooks. I have never had to cope with tilting it around constantly to keep the window reflections from my office off the screen. Stupid design. Bring back the macbook pro screen. It would be nice if there was a film or something that could be placed over it to kill the glare.

So far I am getting about 2.5h of battery life with video chat and wifi enabled. That's about 30-45min less than the MBP.

I don't like the screen, the battey life is tolerable, the SSD is crazy fast (10s or so boot), and I don't need much disk space for the secondary computer, but I would like more. I am finding it alot more portable than I thought.

The only place where I see a performance hit is while running windows XP apps under coherence in Parallels. The redraws are very sluggish compared to the MBP.

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dr (apparently) - Feb 7, 2008 6:34 am (#1 Total: 4)

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Posts: 429

Re: 2 Days with the Air

rgbuice wrote:
> I have finished my first two days with the Air.

> I am accustomed to having TB of disk space so I am having a little
> trouble coping with the 64Gb SSD. I thought it would be OK, but then
> I realized that the preinstalled stuff takes 30G. I have already
> eliminated the language localizations (1.6G) however I sure would
> like to reduce the OS footprint more if possible. Any suggestions?

I'd look at printers and Garage Band. Especially the GB support files.

But use a program called WhatSize to see where the space is going. This gives you a column finder like view with the biggest folders at the top. You can quickly maneuver around and find out where the space is being used.

David Ross

Matt Neuburg (apparently) - Feb 7, 2008 5:30 pm (#2 Total: 4)

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Posts: 2577

Re: 2 Days with the Air

On or about 2/6/08 5:54 AM, thus spake "rgbuice" <rgbuice

gmail.com>:

> the preinstalled stuff takes 30G. I have already eliminated the language
> localizations (1.6G) however I sure would like to reduce the OS footprint more
> if possible. Any suggestions?

Reinstall the system, in the manner suggested in my Customizing Leopard
e-book: reject the system language localizations and all printer drivers you
don't need. Then use Disk Inventory X to find remaining large files / apps
you don't need. My System Folder is less than 3.5G.

For years and years, right up thru Tiger, I did all my travelling with an
iBook whose hard disk was just 20G, and it was *plenty*. It's just a matter
of priorities. m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matt

tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
Among the 2007 MacTech Top 25, http://tinyurl.com/2rh4pf
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide, http://tinyurl.com/2ouo3b
Take Control of Customizing Leopard, http://tinyurl.com/2t9629
TidBITS, Mac news and reviews since 1990, http://www.tidbits.com

Lewis Butler (apparently) - Feb 8, 2008 5:01 am (#3 Total: 4)

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Posts: 928

Re: 2 Days with the Air

On 6-Feb-2008, at 06:54, rgbuice wrote:
> I have already eliminated the language localizations (1.6G) however
> I sure would like to reduce the OS footprint more if possible. Any
> suggestions?

GarageBand takes up something like 4GB with all its instruments. iDVD
is another 2GB or so. They each have large folders in /Library/
Application Support/

There are a lot of Garageband files (2GB) in /Library/Apple Sounds/
iirc, but I'm not sure how safe those are to remove.

David Weintraub (apparently) - Feb 9, 2008 6:33 pm (#4 Total: 4)

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Posts: 197

Re: 2 Days with the Air

Are you okay with the command line?

Bring up the terminal and type in the following command (you can use
cut and paste):

prompt> sudo find / -x -type d -print0 | xargs -0 du -sxk | sort
-nr | tee ~/Desktop/sizes.txt

You will be asked for your password since this command will need
"root" (administrative) permission in order to see into particular
folders -- especially other user folders. This command does not modify
any files (except it does create a "sizes.txt" file on your desktop).

However, if running as a "root" user makes you nervous, leave out the
"sudo". That will prevent you from looking at the size of other user
accounts, but it will still get you about 90% of the rest of the
directories on your system.

The output of this command will produce a file called "sizes.txt" on
your desktop which will contain a list of all folders on your
directory from largest to smallest.

I find a directory by directory listing helpful because it can point
to a directory whose contents take up quite a bit of room, but whose
individual files aren't that big. (Like a folder that contains a lot
of MP3s). It will quickly lead you to the culprits that are taking up
so much room on your system.

The last time I ran this command, I found out my mail was taking up
about 12 gigabytes of space because of all the attachments.

--
David Weintraub
qazwart

gmail.com

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