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plasticmoz · May 19, 2004, 07:29 PM

Hi,

I'll be getting my new 12" PB on Friday together with a stick of 512MB RAM from Crucial.

Now this is my first Mac, and I am wondering if I should first do a restore from the provided DVDs and customize what I need before proceeding to do anything else. Is this the usual practise? I just want to have a fairly minimalistic installation and then add the few applications I need for work.

Thanks in advance.

tooki · May 19, 2004, 07:38 PM

Well, it certainly can't hurt, but you also lose nothing by just trashing the apps you don't need.

tooki

discotronic · May 19, 2004, 08:24 PM

I never feel that a system belongs to me unless I install everything from the ground up. Besides that, I don't need the additional printer drivers and language support that is installed by default. It just takes up space and I'm pretty sure that I can find other uses for it.

The Placid Casual · May 20, 2004, 06:24 AM

Originally posted by plasticmoz:
Hi,

I'll be getting my new 12" PB on Friday together with a stick of 512MB RAM from Crucial.

Now this is my first Mac, and I am wondering if I should first do a restore from the provided DVDs and customize what I need before proceeding to do anything else. Is this the usual practise? I just want to have a fairly minimalistic installation and then add the few applications I need for work.

Thanks in advance.

Congrats on the new machine!

I would be tempted to leave thigs as they are from new and just delete what you don't want.

There is remakably little rubbish on the drive to begin with on Apple machines unlike their PC counterparts.

Michel_80 · May 20, 2004, 06:51 AM

How about the language files worth GB's of data?

diskgolfking · May 20, 2004, 11:07 AM

Delocalizer is apparently an option

http://www.bombich.com/software/local.html

According to their forums people have had success using it with Panther

typoon · May 20, 2004, 12:13 PM

Originally posted by diskgolfking:
Delocalizer is apparently an option

http://www.bombich.com/software/local.html

According to their forums people have had success using it with Panther

I'm one of those people who has sucessfully used it on Panther. I know several who also have. It helps the save TONS of space if you have a lot of Apps with localizations. The most I've saved so far is 1.5 gigs.

typoon · May 20, 2004, 12:21 PM

What I like to do is reformat and re-install everything customizing it for my needs/likes.
When I re-installed I chose the custom option. I usually keep all the printer drivers because you never know especially with a powerbook where you will be and what printer you will be plugged into. I DO remove the check from the language packs so that they are not installed; also if you don't need additional language fonts uncheck that too. X11 is good to have. In the applications I unchecked IE and since I have iLife 04 DVD I unchecked the iApps too. You might want to leave that checked since iLife 04 is probably part of the install. I've gotten my install down to about 1.9-2.0 Gigs. After the install I went through the Applications folder and got rid of apps like ZINIO that I don't need/want.

Hope that helps

Ultimately it's YOUR powerbook and you can do with it as you like. I'm just nutty like that an enjoy the re-install every so often.

plasticmoz · May 20, 2004, 03:05 PM

Thanks guys, very useful replies.

I will be using this primarily for development (UNIX mainly) and so the suggestions are good ones. I don't think the switch will be too bad.

I just wanted to make sure that doing a restore from the Apple supplied discs would be fairly harmless. I don't particularly want to mess up the installation having just gotten the laptop

. From what I have read and seen in this thread it seems pretty straightforward - customization is good! I'll probably boot it up once with the preinstalled stuff, play around for a few hours - install the RAM make sure that's all good and then do a format/restore from the discs.

Thanks!

typoon · May 20, 2004, 03:23 PM

Originally posted by plasticmoz:
Thanks guys, very useful replies.

I will be using this primarily for development (UNIX mainly) and so the suggestions are good ones. I don't think the switch will be too bad.

I just wanted to make sure that doing a restore from the Apple supplied discs would be fairly harmless. I don't particularly want to mess up the installation having just gotten the laptop . From what I have read and seen in this thread it seems pretty straightforward - customization is good! I'll probably boot it up once with the preinstalled stuff, play around for a few hours - install the RAM make sure that's all good and then do a format/restore from the discs.

Thanks!

most likely you will only have 1 disc. It'll probably be a DVD.