Mac OS X Lion Pocket Guide

Using Lion

Once you have Lion running and your system set up, what do you need to know to use it? This section teaches you the basics of starting up your Mac, getting around after you’ve booted, and shutting the machine down.

Starting Up

Chapter 2 covered what happens when you turn on a fresh, out-of-the-box Mac (or a new install of 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 Lion (unless you tell it otherwise).

Note

If you’ve installed Boot Camp (see Boot Camp Assistant) or another operating system, you can set the default startup disk with the Startup Disk preference pane (see Startup Disk).

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 logged in. (If you’ve disabled automatic login, you’ll instead 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 Mac OS X.)

Thanks to Resume, all the apps that were running when you last turned off your Mac will automatically open with all the windows you had before. But you don’t have to use Resume if you don’t want to. When you shut down or log out of your Mac, the dialog box that appears includes ...