by Mary Hale

Created on: February 26, 2010

If your Mac is running slower than usual and you find that you are also running low on hard drive space, not to worry, there are many easy to perform options to let you clean up your hard drive, restore space, and make your whole system run much smoother and faster again.  To start off on the right foot, first determine just how much free space you actually have available on your hard drive.  This can be done with just a few simple commands.  Open the Finder and then select your hard drive’s icon.  This is usually the icon marked Macintosh HD.  Now press the Command key and the I key at the same time, and a window displaying information about the disk including free space and total capacity will open.  Now you know just exactly how much free space you have on your hard drive. 

It is a good idea to do a system back up before cleaning out your hard drive so that important files will not be lost.  This is also a very useful way to free up disk space on your computer.  When a complete system back up is performed, all the files stored on your computer will be backed up in another location, i.e. an external hard drive, thumb drive, or CD/DVD.  Any files that are not needed on the actual hard drive can be stored on other media such as these for later use; by doing this you can easily free up quite a bit of space on the system’s hard drive.  It is a good idea especially to store photos on either DVD’s / CD’s or an external hard drive simply because of the large amount of hard drive space these files can take up.

You can also free up more space by compressing old files that are not used frequently.  This can be done by selecting the items that you wish to compress and then selecting “compress” from the file menu.  If only one item is compressed, the new smaller file will have the same name as the original file with a extension of “.zip”; if multiple items are compressed the compressed file will be named “Archive.zip”.  When a compressed file is opened, it is replaced by a folder containing uncompressed copies of the original files.

One of the easiest places to begin, and most often overlooked, is the trash can.  Simply click on the trash can icon on the dock and then select empty.  All files that are in the trash will be deleted and valuable disk space will be recovered.  Another option that can be used when emptying the trash

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