On the road to My Presentation on February 1st

I'm presenting 5 tips (and 3 Bonus tips if time permits) on February 1^st.

One tip I'd like to advise you about is: Knowing How Much Free Space lies on your Hard Drive and Just What Does Lie on your hard drive?

You can use the Finder and various Terminal commands to do this, but a couple of free programs make it easier (at least for me).

The first is Omnigroup's OmniDiskSweeper 1.7.2. To download the program, go here.

This program presents a column view of your chosen hard drive or partition's files. At the left hand side, you see the folders at the root of the partition or drive. Click on one and see its subfolders in the next column. See another folder you want to check out? Click on it and it displays its subfolders in the next rightward column.

It's great for digging into your files and seeing what hogs space, but what if you want more display options? Then I suggest you download Jgoodies' JdiskReport 1.4.0. This version is Universal, so it should work with 10.7. The developer wrote it in Java, so it runs a little slower than OmniDiskSweeper. On the plus side, the developer has versions for Windows and Linux, too.

Once it digests your file structure, it displays a pie chart of your folders. At the top of the display, the program displays 5 button: Size, Top 50, Size Distribution, Modified, and Types. Click on them to see a different view of your hard drive's contents.

Once you know what files take up too much room, whether it's a CD you ripped in lossless, space-hogging AIFF format instead of M4A or pictures in TIFF format instead of JPEG; BE CAREFUL WHEN DELETING!

If you access these files from within iTunes or iPhoto or Mail, you want to use these program's Delete feature to delete these files. You're working within a database, just like taking books from a library. You have to check out at the counter first before removing the books!

So I hope to see you in the audience on February 1^st. Depending on how much time we have, I look forward to your comments. If you can't make it and have a comment, please contribute those thoughts!