OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide (5 page)

Chapter 2
covered what
happens when you turn on a fresh, out-of-the-box Mac (or a new install
of Mountain Lion). Each time you boot up your Mac after that, the
startup experience is usually seamless. As you’d expect, your Mac will
boot into Mountain Lion (unless you tell it otherwise).

The first thing you’ll see when you start your Mac is the gray
Apple logo, followed by the spinning wheel that resembles a circle of
perpetually falling dominoes. Once your Mac finishes booting, you’ll be
presented with a list of users or a username/password prompt, depending
on your settings (see
Logging In
for more details);
log in and you’ll be transported to OS X.

Thanks to Resume, all the apps that were running when you
last turned off your Mac can automatically open with all the windows you
had before. But, unlike Lion, you’ll have to tell OS X to use Resume. To
get Resume resuming, when you shut down or log out of your Mac, a dialog
box that appears includes a “Reopen windows when logging back in”
checkbox. Check that box and, when your Mac finishes starting up, all
your windows will be just how you left them!

When you start up your Mac after creating an account,
you’ll be greeted by the pic you snapped or the image you chose when you
set up the account and a place to type your password (don’t forget it!).
This is different from previous versions of OS X, which automatically
logged you in (no typing that pesky password) when your Mac was booted.
If you want the old behavior back, you can enable it by visiting the
Users & Groups preference pane and manually enabling Automatic
Login. Simply click the lock icon in the panel’s lower left, click Login
Options, and then use the “Automatic login” menu to select the user
who’s automatically logged in.

The Login Options settings are also where you can control
fast user switching (which is on by default). This feature lets you
switch users without having to log off, so the applications that you
have running keep going while another user logs into her account.
However, having more than one user logged in can use up quite a bit of
memory, so if your computer is already kind of slow, you might want to
turn this feature off.

If you leave fast user switching on, look for an icon or username
on the right side of the menu bar. Click this name or icon and then use
the drop-down menu to select another user to log in as someone else. If
you turn fast user switching off, you’ll have to log out
(
→
Log Out) before
you can log in as a different user.

Using the Mac is great, but at some point you’ll want to
stop
using it. When you reach that point, you’ve
got a few options: