Changing the short username
This article would have been really helpful…YESTERDAY! It goes into great detail giving you 3 different ways to change your short username on a Mac with Leopard. I ran into a problem where I was setting up a new computer for a new employee and had it all done for them for their first day. The first thing she then says to me when she comes in and sits down at her computer is, “They got my name wrong”. So, not knowing I could change the short username (I had already spent too much time trying before without any luck), I just deleted her account and created a new one. The problem with that is while it doesn’t take too much time to create a new account, I had to set up all our user preferences again from scratch. That meant adding applications to the dock, setting up bookmarks in Firefox, and adding the network printers to her Printer list.
The other obvious time this would come in handy is if someone changes their name, such as when a female gets married and has a new last name. Instead of having write down all their personal settings and redo everything on a new account, now I can just change the username along with the account name. In short, it makes my job a heck of a lot easier.
- Thanks Dan Frakes, from Macworld.com
