Snow Leopard 'vanilla' install

arcamalpha

arcamalpha

arcamalpha

Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
1,145
Hi all,

I'm about to buy my first Mac, and wanted to check how 'clean' the ready-installed copy of Snow Leopard is.

To explaine, when I buy a PC, such as a Dell it will come with Windows installed, plus some Dell-specific tweaks and configuration settings and then a load of rubbish software. Therefore I rebuild from scratch and install what I want, which generally results in a much quicker-running system.

Is it the same with Macs or should I just leave the ready-installed software and start using it?
 
With a Mac you don't really get anything on there that you don't need. It will come with the iLife pack installed which includes iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and Garageband. You may not use any of this stuff so it could be uninstalled if you wish.

Another thing you may want to do is run monolingual. This removes all the foreign language files which you probably won't use or want.

However all this will just save space rather than increase performance.
 
That's interesting to know about the monolingual because I just bought an iMac 27" on Sunday and just managed to set it up last night.

It took me nearly two evenings to move my PC set up from one desk to another. Cable for that, cable for this, USB here, USB there and everyehere.

For the iMac all of 5 minutes job. Unpack packagings, power cable to machine and wall socket then switch on. DONE.

Cheers for the info h_p45
 
Be very very careful with monolingual, I've had it totally kill a Leopard installation and there are a lot of horror stories around about it. I don't think it's worth the small amount of space it saves considering the size of hard drives nowadays.

To answer the original question, just open the box, turn it on and use it :)
 
  1. Boot off the Leopard OS X disc.
  2. When the installer screen appears, on the menu bar (the taskbar at the top) click "Utilities"
  3. Open "Disk Utility" and erase the primary partition.
  4. Create a new primary partition (the default name is "Macintosh HD")
  5. Close Disk Utility
  6. Continue with installation. Click "Customise" to change default installation items.
  7. Untick all the printer drivers, and any pre-installed apps you don't care about (e.g. Garageband)
  8. Done.

That's my "clean" installation, that I do on every Mac I get :cool:
 
rpn said:
That's interesting to know about the monolingual because I just bought an iMac 27" on Sunday and just managed to set it up last night.

It took me nearly two evenings to move my PC set up from one desk to another. Cable for that, cable for this, USB here, USB there and everyehere.

For the iMac all of 5 minutes job. Unpack packagings, power cable to machine and wall socket then switch on. DONE.

Cheers for the info h_p45
Click to expand...

You're not really comparing like for like though. ;)

With like for like you would have wireless mouse and keyboard (so two small dongles in USB sockets, that means only two power cables and a monitor cable (so three instead of one).:p
 
Just use it. There's no crapware included by Apple, just the OS and iLife.

As suggested above you can remove language support and printer drivers etc to save a bit of disk space, but you won't get any extra noticeable performance.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom