My kids want to use my Hackintosh netbook – a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 running Snow Leopard. One of the great things about OS X is its excellent built-in parental controls, but on a netbook with a small 600 pixel-high screen, the buttons for setting them up are off the screen.
I tried using an external monitor – with amusingly mad and useless results… then I found this trick. Open up a Terminal window and type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8
This makes the next window you open small enough to see the required buttons. Set up the parental controls, type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1
in the Terminal command line.
Sweet!
Do you need to be an admin to do this? We have some low res data projectors at work, which are infuriating when you’re trying to demo a program that needs a higher resolution display. Windows fall off the edge all the time.
This sounds like it would help solve that problem.
I suspect you do need to be an admin – I was logged in as one at the time. Will have a test.
Just tried it on Henry’s (non-admin) login and it seems to work. I now have a small clock and system icons on the top-right when I logged back in, though, even after restaring the Finder. Proceed with caution!
OK, thanks. Might be best not to try on works Macs then.
It was fine when I rebooted