Shut Down or Sleep, Faster Trackpads and Setting Entourage :: My First Mac - Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac

Shut Down or Sleep, Faster Trackpads and Setting Entourage

Quick Scan

Download MouseZoom or iMouseFix to adjust your tracking speed.

Let your Mac sleep instead of shutting down.

You can change the default email program in the Mail.app preferences.

Older Macs, Dimming Screens, File Extensions

Home pages, laptop lids and Windows Media

Force Quitting, Removing USB devices, iChat.

“Programs” File, Download Clutter, and Slow Macs

Shut Down or Sleep, Faster Trackpads and Setting Entourage as the default email program

By: Chris Kerins
Published: Monday, July 9, 2007
Categories: My First Mac Q&A

Welcome to My First Mac's Q&A column. It is said that Macs are easier to use, but they are still complex in their own right. Here are a few questions we have received lately from readers like you. Sometimes we reformat the questions for clarity and presentation.

This week we have questions about making your trackpad faster, whether to shut down or put your MacBook to sleep, and how to get Entourage to launch as a default.

		My track pad on my new MacBook seems slow even at it's fastest setting compared to my Dell laptop. Is there a way to make it go even faster?

		Apple uses an acceleration algorithm that adjusts the distance the cursor moves with the speed of your movement. The idea is to give you more precision at slower speeds, but it really throws PC users off. First, make sure you have already increased the speed as much as you can in your Keyboard & Mouse>Trackpad preferences. If that's not enough and you want to get that speedy feeling on your Mac, there are a couple 3rd party utilities that can help you out. The first is MouseZoom (free) that lets you adjust the speed of our mouse cursor. Another is iMouseFix (free) which will let you turn on/off mouse acceleration or adjust the acceleration factor. Give them a shot and let us know how it worked out for you.

		Should I be turning my new MacBook off or just closing the lid and making it sleep when I'm not using it? I like that it just comes back awake right after I open the lid.

		One of the great things about the Mac is that you rarely ever have to restart it. Some people try to have bragging rights as to how long they have gone without a restart. And the wake from sleep function is pretty rapid, so it's really the best way to go. My suggestion is to restart your Mac only when it gets sluggish in many applications over 20-30 minutes. Every once and a while your Mac will benefit from a clean slate in its RAM. But other than that and when you restart after installing updates or new programs, it should just run and run.

		Whenever I click on an email link on a web page, Apple Mail opens. Is there a way to have Microsoft Entourage open instead?

		Yes, but it's kind of hidden. Next time Mail launches, go to the Mail menu then Preferences>General. At the top you will see Default Email Reader. This is where you can select another application to launch whenever you click on email links. To change the default email application that iPhoto uses to send photos, go to iPhoto menu>Preferences>General and at the bottom change the setting: "Email photos using:" to Entourage. Now you can click the Email button in the bottom row in iPhoto to send your pictures to friends and family using Entourage.

You can send in your questions via the Contact page or email us at editor[AT]myfirstmac[DOT]com. Because of the volume of email we receive, we can't reply to each and every question personally. We read each question that comes in and reply to the ones that fit the scope of this column. We also save some questions for future columns.

If you need your specific question answered right away, try asking it in the Comments section of a related article.


	This button is an easy way to let readers bookmark articles on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks and other services with a single click. You can find out more about Social Bookmarking here.

What is this?

Tell A Friend

Print Page

Your Comments:

THANK YOU! My number one complaint about my kick*ss Macbook Pro has been the speed of the mouse. I am so happy to find a cure. I don't get why Macs don't just come with the option to turn the mouse speed up higher. I am psyched and my efficiency just went up 100%.

sebas
07/15/2007 at 11:03 AM

i am new user in MAC BOOK this is the best site that i ever seen

you are decently did my life easy

thank you

Asif mauda
07/16/2007 at 10:27 PM

Great web pages - thanks

A follow up question - can you set entourage as your default mailer without starting mail. I ask because if I start mail it wants me to set up an account, which I don't want to do.

Howard
09/20/2007 at 02:03 AM

Unfortunately you have to start up Mail at least once to change the default. Why Apple doesn't put this in the System Preferences I don't know.

You could just put fake account information and only go as far as you need to so the "preferences" option in the Mail menu is no longer grayed-out.

Chuck Konfrst
09/20/2007 at 12:06 PM