OS X Mavericks Portable Genius

Chapter 3 How Do I Change the Mavericks System Preferences?

By this point, you are familiar with my affinity for making your Mac behave as you want. No other place in Mavericks gives you more control over your Mac than System Preferences. This is where you can assert yourself as the alpha user and firmly establish yourself as the ruler of your computing domain. In System Preferences, you can make local and system-wide changes to networking, security, software, hardware, sound, and the appearance of Mavericks. This chapter explains what preferences are available to help you tame Mavericks and how to change them if you need or want to.

Personal

The Personal section of the System Preferences, as I prefer to still call it, is where you can customize the way your Mac looks and behaves. I cover only the Language & Region, Security & Privacy, Spotlight, and Notifications preferences here because the others are covered in detail in Chapters 1 and 2.

For the first time since OS X’s inception, the System Preferences have lost their section titles (Personal, Hardware, and so on). The section titles were what I used to delineate the different parts of this chapter in the past, and because the preferences still fall under these general ideas, I continue to use the old section titles for this ...