In the last article we talked about working with your Mac’s shortcut keys. In the same light, this article, and several to follow, explains what your System Preferences is, what it does and some things you can do to configure everything from screen resolution, sound to keyboard and mouse controls. We’ve already spoken, too, about the Applications and what each of these can do for you.

Now, it’s time to get started on each of the preferences and what each icon under the Personal, Hardware, Internet & Network and System (& Other) does for you. In order to
open the System Preferences… you must go up to the silver once-bitten apple at the top of the menu bar and scroll down to System Preferences…to get started.

Appearance

In the newest OS for Mac, some things have gotten incredibly better and faster and more user-friendly, while other choices have, well, remained the same. Whether it is Apple’s
intention to be conservative in some preferences—such as Appearance—or simply to leave alone what is good, we users may not see many changes to some preferences as
long as we do not work for Apple’s design team. At any rate, the Appearance preference is practically the same from Tiger to Leopard.

With System Preferences… open, you’ll see the four categories mentioned in the introduction. Under the Personal category, you’ll click on Appearance. From here you
can:

• Select the color for the look of your windows, panes, menus and buttons
• Change the highlight color when you run your cursor over text to be highlighted
• Change your scroll arrow location: either together or separated on opposite ends
• Change how the scroll bar works: from going to the next page, to going to the location you click, and whether or not you want smooth scrolling on/off
• Set the number of most recent items displayed (makes recent items quicker to open: from 5 to 50) for Applications, Documents and Servers
• Set your font smooth over and style: from Automatic to Standard to Light and Strong

° Change whether font smoothing is on/off for a specific font size
• Click on the question mark in any System Preference... preference pane to search for answers to that particular preference

Jeff Graber is CEO of the [url=http://www.macsupportstore.com]Mac Support Store[/url], a Mac consulting-support company. Since 1996, he’s led the company to consult and support over 17,000 Macintosh computers for business clients. Graber’s "Inside Wire" and "Essential Apple" columns appears whenever the spirit moves him.