GeekForce

I was in the local Mac store a few weeks ago, buying the new iLife.

A customer was looking around, and asked one of the salespeople if it was possible to skip installing the languages on the system during the install.

“They slow down the system.” he said.

“Yes you can choose to skip the languages” I said “It’s in the customize pane”

“You know, the system only uses those files when it needs to… So, they dont really slow things down.”

“Dont try and talk me out of it, I’ve studied it, and I know.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Well, the system still has to read over those parts of the disk to get to the other files…” He said.

“Well, the heads PASS over those sectors if they need to… but they do not read anything from the disk while they are doing it.” I pointed out that it is possibvle to slow down reads by spreading data accross the inner and outer physical sectors of the disk - this is called thrashing. But it is rare.

And on Mac OSX it’s nigh impossible to do. MacOS automatically defragments files that are large enough to merit it.

MacOS also includes a hot zone, a place that it keeps applications that are used frequently. This is how the OS makes sure that your apps are nice and snappy.

So… No. Languages do not slow down your computer.