Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter I.6. Customizing Your Mac and Adjusting Settings

In This Chapter

• Changing the Desktop

• Customizing the screen saver

• Changing the display and appearance

• Changing the date and time

• Adjusting sounds

• Saving energy

• Picking a printer

• Creating accounts

• Making Mac more accessible for people with special needs

• Talking to your Mac

Every Mac works the same, but that doesn't mean they all have to look and feel the same. To personalize your Mac, you can change the way it looks and even how it behaves.

If you have trouble with your vision, hearing, or movement, even using a computer as friendly as your Mac can be difficult. Thankfully, every Mac comes with special universal access features that you can turn on and modify.

By customizing your Mac — and adjusting to how it works to make things easier on your eyes, ears, or hands — you can stamp it with your personality and truly turn your Mac into a personal computer that feels like it is working with you and for you, rather than against you.

Changing the Desktop

The Desktop fills the screen in the absence of any program windows. Generally, the Desktop displays a decorative background image, but you can display any image, such as a picture captured with a digital camera or a favorite picture you downloaded from the Internet.

Choosing a built-in Desktop image

Your Mac comes with a variety of images stored and organized into different categories. To choose one of these images as your Desktop image, follow these steps:

1. Control-click anywhere on the Desktop and ...