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On the surface of it, OS X Mountain Lion’s Resume feature seems like the perfect way to speed up your workflow and save precious time re-opening apps and documents every time you fire up your Mac. When you quit an app or shut down your machine, Resume kicks in, saving the state of everything from the documents you’ve got open, right down to the exact position of every window on your Desktop. For a lot of people it’s incredibly useful, but if you’re starting to find Resume a little annoying, there are a few ways to tame and customise it, or even turn it off completely. If you fall into this latter category, be sure to follow our Resume preferences guide below. We’ll be delving into your Mac’s Library folder, so be sure to follow the instructions carefully, but if you do, you’ll have Resume working exactly the way you want it to.
1: A General pane
Head to System Preferences and hit the General Preference pane. Unless you’ve done some major moving about, it’s usually located in the top-left.
2: A simple switch
Turning Resume on or off is a simple case of ticking or unticking the checkbox next to ‘Restore windows when quitting or re-opening apps’.
3: Reveal Library
In Lion, Apple hid the Library folder, making it much harder to accidentally delete vital files. To find it, head to Finder’s Go menu while holding the Alt key.
4: Find folder
Once you’re in, tread carefully and head straight down to the Saved Application State folder – this is where Resume’s data on different apps is kept.
5: Name the states
Each folder in the Saved Application State folder is named after a different app. Find the folder for the app you’d like to disable the Resume function from.
6: Delete the data
Once you’re in the folder of the app you’d like to be Resume-less, delete its contents, as that is the data Resume uses to reload its windows.
7: Lock it up
To stop Resume adding any more data for this app, select its folder, open up its Get Info panel (Command + I) and check the Locked box.
8: Quit and close
To put a temporary stop to Resume on an app-by- app basis, hold down the Alt key as you quit – this will close windows and ensure they don’t reappear.
9: Terminal command
Use the terminal command ‘defaults write com. apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false’ to curtail Resume on an app-by-app basis.
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