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Leopard, 4 GB Ballast of generic printer drivers?

Greetings,

Just making my first steps with OSX and if I am not mistaken, there are 4 Gigabytes of generic printer drivers installed. <shaking head in disbelief>

Now I wonder, what is a good strategy to get rid of this ballast?

Or does this require a new OSX setup?
 

Jack_Flesher

New member
George:

My advice is to leave them, and I'll explain why:

First off, 4G sounds like a lot weight, but when you consider your primary drive space is probably 500G and cost you maybe 20 cents a Gig, the "burden" of those drivers is pretty nominal.

Second, you'll note a little added goodie in Leopard called "Bonjour." It does a few things automatically, and one is find network printers and automatically loads a basic, but proper driver when you have a net connection, wired or wireless. I discovered it by accident one day as I needed to print a document, did the Cmd+P and saw a pair of printers available, and wirelessly to boot, yet neither had been installed by me! So I chose the Brother first and hit print, then chose the HP next and hit print, went to each printer and found perfect copies of my documents on each.

IOW it's pretty darn convenient, especially on a laptop where you may be printing from anywhere...

Of course the OS is smart enough to load a proper driver any time you plug a printer in directly, but it is a basic one. So for example on a photo printer like your large Epson, you'll need to install the proper drivers and associated software.

PS: You'll also find like 2G of built-in sounds for "Garage Band" -- and if you are anything like me, that's a program that has never even been launched on my system! :)

Cheers,
 
Hey Jack,

Garbage Band went to trash as well of course. LOL ;)

Thanks for the explanation.

I called apple support to learn how to get rid of it. Well, he said just to dump all the printers that I do not need from the library. But I doubt this is the same like a propper driver uninstall, can't be, or is OSX so clever to clean up remaining parts afterwards, during a "sleep session"? Not sure about that.

Still wait on the rest of my gear, it is the pits, the bastards had been paid 30th of June and still stuff is missing. Ah well, longer story and not pleasant.

But what is pleasant is the performance of that 8 core monster, had it up and running yesterday for the first time. Awesome!

Btw. Just by looking at this apple mighty mouse I got sick. LOL! I found a pretty interesting mouse that works well and has much better features and control.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices/130&cl=us,en
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Hi Georg
Efectively, you can trash the printers profiles directly to the bin, the're only printers description for the system. They lie in the root library/Printers (not the user's).
As Jack has already advised, I wouldn't do that on the MacBook…
My mighty mouse sleeps well for years now, I use instead logitech or Microsoft ones…
 
I just got 2 new Macs and did what I always have done since OS 10.1 + : at start-up I put in the install CD - now DVD -, erase and format my hard drive, and then proceed to install Mac OS X, in this instance a Custom install. This allows me to eliminate unwanted language localizations, fonts, printer drivers and applications. While ,as Jack says, it is true that disk space is cheap, and he shows the use of having all these printer drivers available, I personally prefer the approach I have indicated above. If you have already set-up your system and installed applications and configured your preferences, you can do an Archive and Install, which allows you to retain all the personal info (such as network settings, etc) and applications but also to do a custom install. You may have to download and install your specific printer driver, but you've got a pristine system.
 

Jack_Flesher

New member
Well, I *used* to do custom installs too... But now that my OS drive is 640G and my entire OS with ALL of the extras and ALL of the software and all of the downloads still in the downloads folder and all of my documents residing there, and with all that it occupies less than 10% of the drive, I'm not too worried about system bloat by having those extras there :)

Re the mouse. Yes, I thought it was a joke too until another buddy --- another PC convert a few months ahead of me --- told me to use it for a week before I trashed it. I did, and honestly by the 2nd day was in love. It just works and I pretty much hate anything bigger or more ergonomic now!

Weird huh?
 
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