Clean out my imac

Question

What would be the least painful way to go about cleaning out my Imac. I have a 1Tb HD and it's almost completely full and it's affecting the performance of my Imac. I'm not the saviest on the Apple computer and I'm still learning... Please help!

Answer 1

To help "clean out" large files you do not need, you can use a utility like this one
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
which visually shows large files taking up most of the space.  Finding the largest files that you no longer need (and deleting them) is the fastest way to clear out some space initially, before digging further.
One place to look would be your Downloads folder.  There are probably many files there that you no longer need.  A good way to look there is to use the List view and sort by Size or by Kind.
Your iTunes Media folder may be taking up a large amount of space.  If you want to get an external hard drive and put your iTunes Media folder there, this article provides instructions.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
You are basically setting a new location for your iTunes Media folder (on the external drive) and telling iTunes to consolidate your iTunes files to the new location.  Once you are sure everything go copied over, you can delete the iTune Media Folder on your internal drive, and free up that space.
If Grand Perspective identifies other larger files that you want to keep but don't access very often, and they collectively are taking up significant space, you can also manually copy those files to the external drive using Finder.
Be sure to have a good backup plan.  For example, you can use the built-in Time Machine. You should have a separate external hard drive for the Time Machine backup archive.