by Magno Urbano

Mac OS X is, without any question, the best OS around. The release of Vista — a sad attempt of Microsoft to copy Tiger functionality —, just served to make Mac OS X to bright stronger. The name “Vista” (Virus Infections Spywares Trojans and Adwares - as some jokers pointed around the web) is in fact is a perfect name for a system that is just a faded “view” of Tiger. MS has to realize that what makes Tiger better are not just the eye candies, on the contrary, are the details… You can make a VW Beetle look like a Jaguar. It’s fine unless you have to drive it…

I have pointed in one of my past posts, that Vista comes from a legacy methodology, regarding to the way the system is created. Using this methodology, you have to create a brand new version of the system if you want to created a localized version of it in some language, for example. So, if my counts are not wrong, 8 versions of Vista has been released in the USA. These versions will be available, according to Microsoft, in 99 languages - by the end of the year. So, 99×8 is equal to 792 versions of Vista, each one on its own package. According to Wikipedia, the European Union has 23 languages. If the same rules applied to XP are applied to Vista, MS will have to release special versions of its OS for the EU. So, multiply 23 by 8 and you have 184 more versions of Vista to add to the pool. China and Korea also demanded some modifications to Windows in the past…

You can imagine something roughly as 800 different packages of Vista, in different languages, flooding the world and causing people to run and to seek for a shelter…

On the other side of the galaxy, billions of light-years ahead, you will find Mac OS X. Just one package for all languages…

Each method has a price and Apple’s method may lead to some space being used on your system’s main disk for the storage of languages, some of them a user will never use.

A similar problem applies to those applications called “Universal Binaries” that store code for both processors — PowerPC and Intel — that may not be used by many users.

But fortunately, there’s a way to solve both problems.

Download a program called Monolingual (freeware). This program can remove languages and binaries you will never use. After using Monolingual I have recovered 2 gigabytes of space!!!!
Beyond what this program can do for you, you can also find some files in several languages you may never use, in the following directory:

/Library/Documentation/Applications

In this directory you will find other directories named after the programs you have installed on your machine. Open these directories and delete everything related to the languages you don’t speak.

WARNING - USE THIS TIPS BY YOUR OWN RISK. WE DO NOT TAKE RESPONSABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THESE TIPS MAY CAUSE. BACKUP YOUR SYSTEM BEFORE DO ANYTHING IN THIS PAGE.

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