There are three more groups of settings under Hardware that were not covered in Part 1. These are Keyboard & Mouse, Print & Fax, and Sound. These Hardware preferences allow you to control physical components of your computer or devises attached to it, such as keyboard, mouse, printer or speaker volume. Let’s dive right in.
Keyboard & Mouse
This group of preferences has lots of great settings. If you have a laptop, this will also include trackpad settings. Here you can adjust the key repeat rate, illumination of the keyboard if you have a MacBook Pro, trackpad speed, double-click speed, scrolling speed and other miscellaneous options. For the mouse you can set various behaviors for the buttons as well as adjust scrolling and clicking speeds. If you have a wireless mouse or keyboard, this is were you will pair them and set some related bluetooth options. Finally, this is a great resource of keyboard shortcuts. This is a great place to come to learn what they are and to modify them. So, if you’d like to keep your hands on the keyboard a little more than come here to find ways to do that. I’ve also written a separate post on keyboard shortcuts that lists some of the commonly used.
Wow! That was a lot.
Print & Fax
For the most part you will not use this group of options very much. In most cases, Mac OS X will recognize your printer and set it up automatically. However, here is where you can set the default printer or the printer that will be selected in the Print Dialog, as well as the default paper size. If you use a fax, this is where you have some options for that. You can enable receiving faxes on your computer in this area of system preferences. And finally, there’s an option to share your printer with other computers.
Sound
I don’t know about you, but I like sound on my computer. It helps me know if there’s a problem or I’m doing something wrong. In this panel you can select the alert sound for the system, set alert volume, set general output volume and also input volume and sensitivity.
This completes the Hardware category of System Preferences. In future posts we’ll discuss the remaining categories, Internet & Network, System and Other.
If you want to receive these posts and other content from this blog via email, sing up for email deliver in the sidebar. Return soon for more great Mac 101 tutorials. If you have a friend that recently purchased a Mac, use the “Share This” link at the bottom of the post to let them know about these tutorials.
Next Lesson:
Mac 101 – System Preferences: Internet & Network