[playby]

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro with the standard 100gig 5400 RPM drive. I was upgrading from a PowerBook with the same disk capacity, however, when I transferred my files, I noticed a large discrepancy in the amount of space available on each machine.

Basically, the MacBook Pro with the same files on it as my previous machine uses up an additional 4+ gigs. I tallied up the sizes of the folders in the root directory (Applications, Library, System, Users) and they added up to the same amount as the corresponding folders in the older laptop.

(I also cleared out a lot of the pre-bundled applications and iLife extras to bring the "Applications" and "Library" folders down in size)

Everything works really well on the MacBook so I'd rather not resort to reformatting the drive. Any ideas?

[Enigmaaron]

Did you actually uninstall iLife? I believe in iLife '06 GarageBand adds a ton more instruments that take up a significant amount of space. If your old powerbook doesn't have GarageBand on it that could make the difference itself.

[playby]

yup, got rid of all of apple's pre-bundled extras.

[playby]

The combined used space of all the visible folders and files on my HD = 80 GB
The used space shown in 'get info' = 84 GB

That's 4 gigs of invisible data

[Enigmaaron]

There's also safe sleep which stores all of your memory to the hard drive when the machine goes to sleep. Apparently this creates a permanent file equal to the size of your total memory so if you have 2GB of RAM there's half of it. You can turn off safe sleep, but you'll have to search for that, I don't remember what the terminal command was for it.