I have purchased a macbook air with 64 gb hard disk. the available space is only 10gb. With this available space, i can't use the system effectively. kindly advise.

Question

I have purchased a macbook air with 64 gb hard disk. the available space is only 10gb. With this available space, i can't use the system effectively. kindly advise.

Answer 1

You should have bought one with a larger SSD. You can regain some space by disabling the sleepimage file:
To disable safe sleep, run the two following commands in Terminal:
$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false
When done, restart your computer. Now go delete the file "/private/var/vm/sleepimage" to free up some hard drive space. When you put your computer to sleep it, should happen in under five seconds; my MacBook now goes to sleep in two seconds.
[robg adds: To state the obvious, with safe sleep disabled, a total power loss will wipe out whatever was open on your machine. To enable safe sleep mode again, repeat the above commands, but change hibernatemode 0 on the first line to hibernatemode 3, and =false to =true on the second line. You'll then need to reboot again. Personally, I prefer the safe sleep mode, even with the slower sleep time and hard drive consumption -- even if for no other reason than it's great when changing batteries on a flight.]
You can also delete unneeded files:
Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
  1. See Lion/Mountain Lion's Storage Display.
  2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
  3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
  4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
  5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
  6. 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.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.