[Tyler McAdams]

I have given a G4 to a friend and I'd like to change the shortname from tymac to his choosen shortname. Is there a way to do this?

[Thinine]

Just do a clean install and have him start from the beginning. That way everything is his.

But I don't know of any easy or good way to change the short name.

[TETENAL]

There is no easy way to do this, though there is some utility that claims it can.

Ideally your friend would do a complete and clean reinstall of the operating system to a formatted disk.

[Tyler McAdams]

I just found a program called "Accounts Enhancer" that does it. Unfortunately it is giving me an error. I emailed the person to let them know.

[slugslugslug]

Someone who's Addicted to MacNN hasn't learned to search VersionTracker and MacUpdate first?

Try ChangeShortName. I've heard it works. At least you're in a situation where if it hoses everything, wiping and reinstalling is a chore but not a heartbreak..

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by Thinine

Just do a clean install and have him start from the beginning. That way everything is his.

But I don't know of any easy or good way to change the short name.

I did it (in Tiger) with the utility posted in here above by slugslugslug (ChangeShortName). Worked flawlessly.

cheers

W-Y

[Big Mac]

Why not just create a new Admin account for the new owner?

[Tyler McAdams]

Originally Posted by slugslugslug

Someone who's Addicted to MacNN hasn't learned to search VersionTracker and MacUpdate first?

Try ChangeShortName. I've heard it works. At least you're in a situation where if it hoses everything, wiping and reinstalling is a chore but not a heartbreak..

I like the "hand feed" attention I get from the good old people of MacNN

I works flawlessly as reported by the company that uses Aliens as biological weapsons

Bigmac I did not want to make a new account because I already took a lot of time tweaking that account out for the new user... it had a lot of stuff on it that made it easier to just finish it up as his new user account and then just change the shortname later.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Big Mac

Why not just create a new Admin account for the new owner?

I've found that simply creating a new account can be a little weird when you're sharing stuff among machines, since the new user will have ID 502, while the main admin on all machines is 501.