My startup disk is almost full! HELP!!!?

Hi! I have a macbook air and my startup disk is almost full. It looks like i barely have anything on my laptop. I empty the trash and the iPhoto trash like everyday and I moved all my videos to my USB drive. I only have about 10 pics left on my laptop. I do have a lot of school documents though, but I know that's not taking most of the space. It's only about 20-30 document files of Microsoft Word. I need this laptop for my school because I'm online schooled. I've been trying to clean it, but then it always says that the trial is over and my mom is never gonna pay for the license. I'm very sure that my mom will never buy something to clean up my laptop, she'd rather buy a new one, but i don't want to buy a new one. All of the files are already here and the startup disk on only almost full, not junked up, so buying a new one isn't an option for me. Please help! Thanks!!

?2013-10-07T15:13:07Z

Favorite Answer

#1. space issue.
In most modern OSs, the trash bin doesn't actually delete anything but it seems you are aware of this. I'm guessing that your school files are taking up more space that you expect but the solution is simple and cheap enough that your mother might go for it. In the Sunday adds, I saw a 32 GB USB flash drive for about $20. Also consider some basic maintenance such as deleting browser history.

Afterthough: the lost space could also simly be due to a back-up feature that is taking up so much space, could simply delete all but 2 full system backups such as the very first one and the last one.

#2. MS Office issue.
There are free and OpenSource alternatives to MS Office out there that can do just about anything and everything MS Office does for (90% of it's users). Take a look at these two:
-LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/
-OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/
In fact, I can only think of 3 classes I took where I absolutely had to use MS Office (it was for an Access database class, each time), I did all my assignments in HS and College with either of the above software and everything was fine.

Anonymous2013-10-07T20:49:59Z

You should delete everything you DON'T need, including the microsoft word files, and delete your browsing history and cookies. Also, you should consider getting an external storage extra space unit [type it in google].
Hope it helped.