Let's take a look at System Preferences. There is still a favorites bar on top but now the main window splits up the control panels into four groups: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Network, and System. Desktop has more images, including wide-screen images for you Titanium owners. You can still pick a picture from your pictures folder, which reminds me that I have to switch my login folder. Start NetInfo, which is surprisingly slow, then change my login folder and restart. Ta-da! It has some of my settings but some of them are weird. Darn it, the dock is now on the secondary screen rather than the main screen. Too far away! Oh well, I'll fix it later.

Back to Desktop. Hey, you can install a separate background on each monitor. Ok, that's enough for Desktop. Dock Preferences. Now you can move the Dock to Left, Bottom, or Right, though it's for all monitors rather than just the main monitor. You can also change the minimize effect and cancel the application launching animation. Hmm, I hope Tinker Tools allows me to move the Dock to just the main monitor.

With General Preferences, you can place scroll arrows together or separated and you can change the number of items in the recent items menu (though you only choose from a half dozen choices). International Preferences looks the same. Login Preferences is also the same as far as I can tell. Hmm, looking at Login Items I note that none of the programs that should automatically launch actually started. And all the item icons are blanked out. Then again, none of the applications are installed on the 10.1 partition.

Screen Saver Preferences looks the same. There are a couple of weird screen savers but I think they were installed in my Library folder. Yup, they were. Strange how you have your own Library folder where you have settings that are picked up as system settings. Makes it a bit harder when you do a fresh install and still have some system items still installed. There is now a Universal Access Preferences and you can turn on sticky keys and mouse keys. Exactly the same as Mac OS 9.

VGA Display Preferences now has a "Show displays in menu bar" option that adds a little monitors menu item so you can change monitor preferences on-the-fly, for both monitors even. Energy Saver Preferences are the same except for the option to put up the battery menu item. With Keyboard Preferences you can turn on full keyboard access. Now you can use the keyboard to access menu and dock items, change the active window and access toolbars and palettes. Not quite as intuitive as I'd like.

Skip to the next panel with changes, Sharing Preferences. Now things are split up into File & Web and Application tabs. The only addition is that you can turn on "Allow Remote Apple events", aka AppleScript linking. It's a nice feature which I've used to have my backup AppleScript start another AppleScript on Jennifer to shut down certain applications so I can back up their preferences. You need a user name and password to remotely command another Mac so it's not a huge security hole.

Speech Preferences has Apple Speakable Items, which I don't think was in 10.0. With Startup Disk now you can restart from the panel. Users Preferences now has more login pictures, I think it was only a duck before. You can also choose a picture on the hard drive, though I think that was there before. That's it with the System Preferences. Next time I'll look at the installed applications.

Totally off-topic: I'm eating the Four Cheese Pasta Roni and it's so much better than Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. I had Mac and Cheese like a year ago and it's exactly the same as when I was a kid. Now as a kid it was good, but as an adult it kind of sucks. It's too plain. The Four Cheese does take a bit more effort to cook but it's so much yummier. And on sale it costs the same as Mac and Cheese on sale. End off-topic.