This is in response to TAUW article: Get the "out of the box" experience with an older Mac. The above article is good, but the steps are limited to regenerating the Setup Assistant. The steps in the comments for deleting the user account are for Tiger (10.4.x) and do not work on Leopard (10.5.x), since Apple deprecated the NetInfo db. Most people will never have to do this, but if you are selling/giving away your old ...More »

This is a republishing of a response I posted on the Mac OS X tribe some time ago. Mac OS X inherited it’s file-level permissions scheme from it’s UNIX ancestors. The advantages of this approach are many fold, not limited to making it very difficult for malicious software to be installed on your system without your direct knowledge and consent. But it can be difficult to understand this system, and thus I wrote this explanation of the ...More »