Five ways to slim down your Mac OS X install

When working with Leopard on laptops, make sure to consider the realities of older units with less space and/or small solid state drives. Leopard typically clocks in at over 8GB for a typical install. That leaves very little space on an old 20GB hard drive (vintage TiBook, anyone?, although all things are possible to those who believe) or a 16GB (or even 64GB) solid state drive for your personal data and media.

Going portable can mean going small. And Leopard, with its standard packages, is anything but that. So how are you supposed to deal with its masses of data, support files and bloated applications? Fortunately, you are not alone. The question of Leopard size, and Tiger before it, has been well explored with a number of excellent tools that will help you bring your overgrown installation under control.