| What do they do?
General settings and preferences are normally made through control panels, accessed through the Control Panels item in the Apple menu. Examples include Date & Time, the part of the Mac OS which sets your Mac’s clock and its options; QuickTime Settings, for configuring multimedia preferences for that extension to the Mac OS; and Adobe Type Manager (ATM) for rendering PostScript fonts. How do they work?
These are miniature programs kept in the Control Panels folder inside your active System Folder, and turned on and off using Extensions Manager (itself a control panel). Most control panels need to load their own extension code into the Mac OS, and this happens early during the startup process when their icons start to be displayed at the bottom of the startup screen. To access a control panel, simply select its name from the hierarchical menu which pops out of the Control Panels item in your Apple Menu. It will then display its settings dialog box. Some, such as Memory (part of the Mac OS), then require you to restart before your new settings will take effect, but most changes are applied immediately. What can go wrong with them?
Common problems relate to the extension code, which can conflict with the OS or other extensions and control panels. If this happens, you’ll need to use Extensions Manager or a third-party replacement, such as Casady & Greene’s Conflict Catcher, to turn off and on different components to try and identify the conflict. You can change the order in which control panels load by prefixing letters to their names, as they load in alphabetical order. This may help get them working better together. How can I upgrade them?
Those that are part of the Mac OS are updated with its upgrades, although some, such as ColorSync and QuickTime, are also supplied as separate products and can be upgraded individually. Third-party products are supported by their suppliers, ideally from their Web sites, although some popular ones (such as ATM) may be included with Mac OS updates. Further info
All good books about the Mac describe common control panels. Web sites include: Dan Frakes’ InformINIT pages, with details of most common control panels, at mc04.equinox.net/informinit; the Complete Conflict Compendium, listing known conflicts and issues, at www.mac-conflicts.com; and MacFixit pages, with detailed discussions of many problems and new versions of control panels and other software, at www.macfixit.com. | |
