You've taken your requisite Apple product unboxing video and boasted about your brand new Mac on Facebook, but now it's time to get down to business. Whether you're new to the Mac or not, here's how to set up and get started.

Title image remixed from an original by Air0ne (Shutterstock).

Before you dive right into your new Mac, there are a few things you ought to do first:

• Run Software Update - Chances are your new Mac isn't as new as it could be. Since OS X was probably pre-installed on it quite awhile back, you're probably due for an update. To get things started, head on over to the Apple menu and choose Software Update. This will launch—you guessed it—Software Update and it will check for new updates. When it's done, install everything available. After you restart, repeat this process again to see if there are new updates. Some updates can't install until others have already been installed, so keep checking until Software Update reports that there are no new updates available
• Get to Know System Preferences - If you're new to the Mac, you should probably take a leisurely stroll through System Preferences (which you can access through the Apple menu and likely find in your dock). Take a look at each of the preference panels so you can become acquainted with your options. You'll eventually find yourself spending a fair amount of time in here so it helps to know where things are.
• Set Up Your Sharing Preferences - In System Preferences, there's a panel called Sharing. Open that up and you'll be presented with a long list of sharing services. Many of these services are very helpful if you need to share with another computer (whether it's your own or someone else's). Take a look at them all and enable the ones you'd find useful—just make sure to only allow your user or any future users created on the machine may end up with access to the enabled services.
• Repair Disk Permissions - Once you're all done, it's always good form to repair your disk permissions so nothing gets out of whack. To do this, go into your Hard Drive —> Applications —> Utilities and open Disk Utility. Choose your hard drive from the list on the left, select the First Aid tab, and click the Repair Permissions button. This will take a few minutes and may not end up repairing anything at all, but it's always good to run it on a regular basis and after you've made significant changes to your machine.

If you want to tweak settings and run maintenance scripts in Mac OS X, you can always take it to the command line. On the other hand, you can always turn to one of the few system tweakers available to get the job done from a graphical user interface (GUI). Our favorite is OnyX for its exhaustive feature set that provides both basic and easy options for any kind of user.

OnyX

Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free
Download Page

by Stephen Ashby

When you next have a strange glitch that a restart does nothing to improve, the next step might be to repair your disk permissions.

Even in an operating system as stable as OS X, odd things can still happen every now and then, like a preference not ‘sticking’, or a folder refusing to open. Although most minor niggles can usually be solved by a force-quit or a restart, it could be that an incorrect disk permission setting might be the cause.
Originating from OS X’s UNIX underpinnings, disk permissions dictate who is allowed to do what with each file or folder on your Mac’s hard drive. You as the administrator might have widespread access to read to and write from all files on your system, whereas a guest or a non-administrator account might be denied the ability to make changes to certain files.
While permissions exist primarily as a safeguard, they can sometimes cause issues when your system comes across a setting that is not what it thinks it should be. Luckily, repairing permissions is a simple process, and we demonstrate how to do it right here – with your permission, of course!

Whitson Gordon — Mac OS X's Archive Utility is a handy built-in tool, but it has some annoying quirks—like the fact that it automatically unzips files but leaves the original archive in place. Here's how to tweak its preferences more to your liking.

On the surface, Archive Utility doesn't look like it has any tweakable settings, because it doesn't stay open when it unzips a file. However, if you open it directly, you can tweak its preferences just like any other app. It's a little hidden, so if you want to edit them, you'll have to navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility to find it (or, if you're using something like Quicksilver, just launch it like a normal app). Once it opens up, you'll be able to open its preferences from the menu bar as normal, and it has quite a few things you can tweak.