It’s easy to forget about uninstalling old printer or scanner software once the device is replaced. Review for software for any external devices you no longer use or have.

Review your Applications folder for any applications you aren’t using.

It’s easy to forget, but a lot of junk can accumulate in these folders over time.

Review and empty your Trash and Downloads folder.

If you can store some or all of these on an external drive, you can make a significant dent in freeing up room on your internal drive. Because of their number and file size, photos, movies and music usually take up the most space. If your internal hard drive is a house, an external hard drive is the storage shed in your backyard.

Store photos, movies and music on an external hard drive when possible.

Media files typically take up the most room. This will tell you where to focus your efforts. Examine which categories of items are the largest.

On the “Storage” Tab under “About this Mac,” you’ll see a breakdown of your hard drive’s contents on a horizontal bar.

If you decide you to stay with your current drive, try these tips to make the decluttering process easy and efficient.

Hard drive replacements can significantly extend the life as well as improve the performance of an aging MacBook Pro, or iMac. If you’re interested in upgrading to a larger hard drive, check out my earlier post on solid state hard drive upgrades.

The next step is to decide whether you need a new, larger-capacity hard drive or whether you want to take steps to reduce the disk space you’re using on your current drive. If you’re using more than 75% of your hard drive, you are running out of space. This tab will show the total amount of space you have free relative to the total capacity of the hard drive. Go to the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen.

So how can you find out if you are running out of space? The first step is to know how much space you’re using of your Mac hard drive’s total capacity. Just as you can outgrow your house, so too can you outgrow your laptop’s hard drive. It’s a place where you store your things, your digital belongings. Your startup disk or internal hard drive is a lot like your house. You may begin to see warning messages that “Your startup disk is almost full”. Running out of disk space on your MacBook Pro or iMac? You may notice a slowness when running programs, accessing files or saving documents.

Clear space on mac startup disk