System Preferences - Your best friend on a Mac

System Preferences – Your best friend on a Mac

Some of you new Mac users might have crazy questions about your your new Apple computer, like:

“Where’s the right click on this thing?”

“How do I add printers?”

“I’m tired of this purple and black space nebula-esque background, how the heck do I change it to something else that doesn’t make me feel like old Spock’s ship is about to come at me through my screen?”

Your answer to these questions and many more lies within your new best friend on a Mac, System Preferences.

Think of it as a user friendly, fairly intuitive Windows control panel, where you don’t need to be afraid to make changes in fear of having to reinstall your operating system at the click of a mouse. In short, System Preferences is an application that is bundled with Apple OS X that is used to personalize both user and global preferences.

When you open System Preferences, you’ll see your preference panes categorized neatly: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other.

Personal:

- Customize user specific preferences that will affect your login, and only your login. I highly encourage you to play with these settings in order to familiarize yourself with its capabilities.

IMPORTANT: The one item I discourage you from touching is under Security/File Vault pane. Turning this on will encrypt your home folder, and cause unusually slow log-in times. Most users will not need this feature, and it is better if left deactivated.

Hardware:

- Customize your internal and peripheral hardware configurations, including printers, sound, mouse and track pad/keyboard settings etc.…

Internet & Wireless:

- Customize your communication and sharing preferences, including Bluetooth, screen and file sharing, VPN and Internet, and Mobile Me (annual membership to Apple’s cloud-like service for home users)

System:

- Customize your computer system related preferences, such as User Accounts, Date & Time, Parental Controls, Software Update scheduling, Speech and Talkback, Startup Disk (Mac OS X will allow you to boot off of net boot images and external firewire devices), Time Machine (Apple’s internal hourly backup system to external or network hard drive), and Universal Access (visually and aurally impaired user settings)

Other:

- A separate section for 3rd party application developers to place preference customization icons for their apps. Look here for global customizations for some of your apps.

- When the desired icon is clicked within System Preferences, it will reveal a configuration window within the application showing you all options for that particular preference. You can always return to the main preference page by clicking “Show All” at the top left.

In summary, System Preferences IS your best friend on a Mac, and will allow you to customize and personalize your Apple computer so that you can have that super cool and unique personal computing experience that nobody can take away from you!

Enjoy!

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