MacTricksAndTips.com

The boot process on a Mac is a magical process, all you see is a grey screen with the magic happening in the background. Did you know that very are various keys which you can use to change how you Mac boots and access certain settings. They are not for every day use, mostly troubleshooting. They are worth knowing if anything goes wrong.

A while ago I mentioned a little tip much you can use to view the boot up text on you Mac. It enabled you to view the verbose output of all of the various commands that your computer uses during the boot phase. Kevin kindly left a comment mentioning how you can set the boot up text to be always visible. It doesn’t take long to implement. This tip does carry a warning of be careful. As you do edit system files that really can stop your Mac from booting up.

Every time you boot up your Mac you hear the familiar boot up sound. But it does get annoying after a while. Disabling it is quite easy, all you have to do is mute your volume. But you have to remeber to do this every time before you shutdown. This is a pain. There are methods in which you can get around this. One uses a preference pane. The other involves creating files that run on boot up and shutdown.

Every so often you will find that you shut down your computer at the wrong moment. For me this is usually just after I find I need to check an email or a website but is is to late. Most the the time it is usually followed by various expletives. What you need to do, is find a quick way to cancel the shut down by invoking a program that needs you to do something. Its really simple and usually works most of the time. Unless you are really slow.

The sleep feature of a Mac is one of the best features for quickly putting your Mac into a state where you can lift it off your desk and be back in the same spot when you start up again. The sleep functions do work better on laptops rather than desktops. This is just a quick tip to wrap up a Saturday of working.