How do I make space on start-up disk

Hi,
I recently upgraded to Lion X.  Now I keep getting notices that my start-up disk is almost full.  How do I make more space?  I'm afraid of deleting things that are important for my Mac.  Please break it down for me step by step.  This is my first Mac, so I'm not too familiar with this laptop or Lion X.  Thanks.
Hilda

Hilda,
Generally, anything in visible folders under your user name in the finder will be documents that you can safely move to an external drive or delete. You should see separate folders for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, etc. None of the files in these folders should be critical to the operation of your mac.
Safest bet is to get an external drive and move things like pictures and movies off of your main drive. These can be especially large files and take up a lot of space. What I do is build a similar group of folders on the external drive, and that makes it easy to keep things organized. Make sure you move the files or copy and then erase as OS X does a copy by default. 
Also, check to make sure your trash is empty, and your downloads folder, it can get full of dmg images and other typical downloads, and most of these can be safely erased unless you don't have access to the original source any more. Hope this helps.

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    With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
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    If you are an iMovie/ Final Cut user, both apps have their own individual Trash location that needs to be emptied, too!
    If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
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    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
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    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506
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    Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.
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    You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!
    With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
    If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.
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    Have you emptied your iMac's Trash icon in the Dock?
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    If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
    Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.
    Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.
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    Once you have around 15 GBs regained, do a search, download and install OmniDisk Sweeper.
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    Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
    Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.
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    See Lion's Storage Display.
    You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
    Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
    Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
    See Where did my Disk Space go?.
    See The Storage Display.
    You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
    You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

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