MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Routine MacBook Air Maintenance

Get your maintenance chores off to a solid start by examining a few tasks that I describe as routine — meaning you ought to perform them regularly to help keep MacBook Air running smoothly.

Emptying the Trash

You might not give a whole lot of thought to the Trash icon that’s a permanent resident on the right edge of the Dock. You delete something, MacBook Air dutifully tosses it into the Trash, and you move on with your life.

However, while you’re busy with other things, the Trash is slowly expanding with each new deleted file or folder. After a while, the Trash might contain several gigabytes of data. What’s the big deal, right? It’s just the Trash, for goodness’ sake! Ah, but the Trash is actually a folder on your Mac’s hard drive. It’s a hidden folder located at /Users/You/.Trash (where You is your user folder name). So the more space the Trash takes up, the less space you have to store episodes of your favorite shows.

To see just how much space the Trash is occupying, follow these steps:

1. Double-click the Trash icon in the Dock.

2. Choose File → Get Info. You can also click the Action icon and then click Get Info, or press +I. The Trash Info window appears.

3. Read the Size value.

In Figure 8.1, you can see that the Trash contains a whopping 4.49GB of data.

So it makes sense to empty the Trash relatively often, perhaps once a month or once ...