As stylish as Mac OS X is, it lacks a little personality out of the box. The default is, well, the default! As nice as Mac OS X looks, we can give it a little extra personal flare. Those Windows users can change their desktop background, but so can we. That’s nothing compared to the geeky glory of changing your Mac OS X boot panel background!

The boot panel (the graphic shown by Mac OS X as its running through its startup routine) can be easily changed in just a couple of minutes. The first step to take when changing your boot panel is to create or find an image you want to use for it. This can be just about any image you like. Next, save it as a PDF. If you can’t immediately do that, use the Preview.app trick. (For those of you unaware, you can print any document on Mac OS X, select Preview from the print panel, and then select File > Save As PDF to create a PDF file from the document). Then, replace the file /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzDisplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf with the one you’ve just created. Reboot, and enjoy!

When changing this or any default system file, be sure to make backup copies of everything you change.