Cus­tomiza­tion of your Mac is one of the best ways to bring your per­son­al­ity to your Mac. And what bet­ter place for us to start talk­ing about cus­tomiza­tion than with the About This Mac screen. Now some of you might not even know where to find this screen. So to begin click on the Apple logo in the top left, and the first item you will see is About This Mac

This is what you will see before you do any customizing.

What we intend to do is cus­tomize the image that you see in this screen. To start goto Finder and locate /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app

If you have trou­ble find­ing this folder you might be look­ing in your cur­rent users home folder and not the root folder of your com­puter. From here you will then need to right click and click Show Pack­age Con­tents, and find /Contents/Resources/MacOSX.tif

Make a backup copy of this file to some­where you can find it, so you can change it back if you want. Then find any new image you’d like, mak­ing sure that the new image is the same size image as the cur­rent one. When you have your image ready, just rename is to MacOSX.tif and place it in the loca­tion above.

To make sure it all works, just Logout and Login again to see changes. Here what I got when I was done. If you get a chance to cus­tomize your About This Mac Screen, we’d love to see it. Just post a link to the image so we can all check it out.

Melissa asks:

Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Pub­lisher ver­sion for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newslet­ter that’s done in pub­lisher, for now any­way, but I have my mac)

Unfor­tu­nately there isn’t any easy way to con­vert a Microsoft Pub­lisher file to some­thing that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fin­gers at Microsoft for releas­ing a pro­gram that is so pro­pri­etary that noth­ing else sup­ports it (our vote!), or you can blame Apple for not try­ing to sup­port a some­what pop­u­lar pro­gram on their plat­form. Either way, you’ve got a file you can’t open now that you’ve switched to your Mac. Here’s a few options:

• If you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it, you export/save as from Pub­lisher as a Word doc­u­ment which will then be able to be opened by var­i­ous pro­grams on your Mac (i.e. Microsoft Word for Mac, Apple’s Pages, OpenOf­fice, etc). You’ll most likely lose some for­mat­ting but at least the con­tents of your doc­u­ment are there to be edited.
• Again, assum­ing you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it — You could take a screen­shot on your Win­dows com­puter of the var­i­ous graphic ele­ments (i.e. logos, graphs, funky text) and then copy and paste the text into one of the pro­grams men­tioned above and rebuild your document.
• Appar­ently, though we’ll have to say we haven’t tried this our­selves, using an old ver­sion of Adobe’s Page­maker for Win­dows you can open the Pub­lisher file, save it as an Adobe InDe­sign file which will then be use­able by Adobe InDe­sign for Mac. We don’t rec­om­mend this route unless you already have the pro­grams as they are quite expen­sive and unless the doc­u­ment is going to gen­er­ate or save you a bunch of money (or if your time is worth a lot of money?), it’s not worth pur­su­ing this route.

Unfor­tu­nately that’s the best we could come up with. Any­one else have any good sug­ges­tions or things that have worked for you?

Mikul asks:

Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been run­ning really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not run­ning any­thing. Also, the bat­tery has been last­ing for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?

One thing you can check is the activ­ity mon­i­tor (if you use spot­light and search for Activ­ity Mon­i­tor). Change the lit­tle box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are some­thing like Safari or Fire­fox is run­ning really high and when you’re shut­ting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still run­ning even though you think it’s not, which is why the bat­tery isn’t last­ing as long as it used to. If it’s a pro­gram that you rec­og­nize (i.e. Safari, Fire­fox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign look­ing but­ton that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about how to fix a loud fan/low bat­tery combo