Hard drive space after PC conversion

Question

I recently made the switch from PC to mac and everything has been great. However, with my 80 gig hard drive space, I only have about 9 gigs left despite the fact that I've only used 15 gigs for music and 8 gigs for pictures.
Even allowing all the programs and peripherals 1 gig of space, where is the rest of my hard drive? I suspect that something happened when moving the files over from my PC (I had to do it via DVD discs because my PC melted), but how do I fix this?

Answer 1

I suspect that what has happened is the following:
You copied say, a DVD of music to somewhere on your hard drive. you then told iTunes either "Add to Library" or "Find music files on my hard drive" (the latter is a choice you only see when setting up iTunes for the first time)
What happened? iTunes copied the music to the folder - "your user name/Music/iTunes Music".
This is where iTunes looks for its tracks and is the important one. There is probably another folder - the one you copied from the DVD, still hanging around on your drive - it can be deleted.
iPhoto works in a similar way - it also has a copy to library function. The important file in this case is in your user name/Pictures/iPhoto Library.
When you got your mini it was also fully loaded with software at the factory. There are a number of items that you most likely do not need.
For instance, Mac OS X is accompanied by dozens of printer drivers, about 800 MB in all. If like most people, you only have one printer, they are just taking space. The drivers are in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers. Delete them and install the driver that came with your printer.
Mac Applications also come with loads of language files that you probably do not need either. You can download a free utility called Monolingual from versiontracker.com which will remove the unwanted language files. I save around 1.8 GB doing this.
Important: if your preferred language is not English you must retain it as well as the one you want. English is used by the operating system.
Removing the others will not prevent you from writing or checking spelling in a language that is no longer on your computer.