As you're probably aware by now it's - blog action day! Well here's a tip that will not only help save the earth but save you money as well!
For some reason, people seem to miss the Energy Saver control panel in the Mac OS X System Preferences. For those that don't know what it looks like I present the Energy Saver icon from the System Preferences.
Case in point I recently visited a client who had a very nice Mac Book Pro (17" with all the bells and whistles) and while we where talking his Mac Book went to sleep. To my surprise the client complained about it saying he "didn't know why it kept doing that" - this is when I clicked that he must be a switcher.
So I introduced him to the Energy Saver options...
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Energy Saver is in my opinion an under rated feature of the Mac OS - I have the Energy Saver setting of every one of our Mac's at home tailored to each Mac's application.
Energy Saver allows you to do a range of things including:
- when to sleep you Mac if it's been idle
- when to sleep the screen when the Mac's been idle
- schedule start-up and sleep/shut-down times
Sleeping your laptop turns out not to be a popular Windows thing to do, of course long time Mac users will be aware that it's a perfectly natural for an Apple laptop to sleep. If you close the lid on you Mac laptop it goes to sleep and you can reliably open it hours later and have it wake-up almost before the lid is completely up. Also you can be pretty sure that the battery hasn't gone flat in the mean time or you Mac Book hasn't overheated with the lid closed while in your carry bag.
Energy Saver Sleep Preferences
Apart from the automatic sleep of laptops when you close the lid all Mac's have sleep options available through the Energy Saver system preferences. As you can see from the image above you can tell you computer to sleep after as little as 1 minute or indeed tell it to never sleep. You can also set a separate sleep option for you display - this is not the same as setting when your screen saver will kick in - rather, it literally put's your monitor into a low power standby mode. This of course assumes that your monitor supports this level of functionality - and if you have a flat screen you're probably covered. Of course if you have Apple displays then you're very definitely covered.
Finally on the subject of Sleep you will notice in the Energy Saver Sleep panel a check box to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" - this is an interesting option. If you check this box your hard disk will be powered down - now if you using Photoshop and doing extensive editing the System won't get the option to sleep the hard disk to often, however if you take a phone call or step away from you Mac it could sleep your hard drive. The effect is that you will notice a slight pause when you return to work as the Mac bring your hard disk back online, ie. spins the disks back up to speed. Personally I've found this to be a good way to extend my battery life on my laptops - so imagine how much benefit it has when used with your desktop computer. Most people will be writing emails, documents or working on spreadsheets for the majority of their computer time - all of these are not disk intensive tasks and as such you will probably never notice that your hard disk has been put to sleep.
Energy Saver Scheduling
Before we move on to the Options tab we will look at the "Schedule..." button in the lower right corner of the Energy Saver window.
Clicking on the Schedule button will bring down the sheet shown above, as you can see this allows you to tell the computer when to start and when to shutdown/sleep.
Now obviously from my setting's you can see that I'm shutting down the computer rather than sleeping it - this way even a trickle of power isn't used while I'm soundly sleeping. However, you can choose to sleep your Mac if you're running systems that keep you linked into the nations missile defence systems and those vital boot-up seconds will make a difference! Even sleeping is a better energy saver than leaving your Mac to chug down the juice through the lonely nights 
Through the menu's provided on this sheet, you can also choose which days to Start up/wake your Macintosh, and most importantly when to Shut Down your Mac. If you give these options a little thought you'll realise its quite flexible. In the sheet shown above you can see that my main computer only wake's up on weekdays and only shuts down everyday, hence on the weekend I don't have to worry about the computer being on while I"m out at the children's sports for example or doing those other things we all do on the weekend away from the computer. You do do other things right? right??
Energy Saver Options panel
Energy Saver also has a few options you can set in the surprisingly named Options tab. These include waking the computer if the Ethernet port is accessed by the network administrator, changing the power button to a sleep button and restarting the Mac after a power failure. Apart from waking on administrator access in a business environment (which requires a sleeping rather than a shut down computer) the other two options just us up juice for no good reason. I mean we're not talking about servers here (and if you server isn't on a UPS that tells it when its time to shut down during a power outage then you're not serious about your server anyway).
Fini
Well that's it for the straight Energy Saver part of the post, the rest is a bunch of reason's and examples of the ways I use it:
- keeping my electrical usage down - as we move to a place where more and more computers inhabit family life (we have 5 desktops & 2 laptops) keeping the Energy Saver settings will make a bigger and bigger impact on our energy bills.
- extending the life of those monitors - most people don't realise that your lovely LCD monitors have lights in the back of them that have a limited life in terms of useable hours and the performance of them degrades over time (ask anyone who calibrates his monitor for photography or video editing). Sleep that monitor when you don't use it and extend its life (even if the Mac OS X screen savers are pretty and useful).
- extending the life of my hard disks - its a bunch of high-speed moving parts people, do you really think they will not wear out spinning at 5000-12000 RPM month after month...
- having scheduled shut down times reminds me to go to sleep and similarly reminds my children when they've hit their bed time.
Of course these are all just ways of saving me money which in a very human way motivates me more than saving the planet in some respects.
Some of you may have gotten to this point and thought that you need more than Energy Saver has to offer, in which case you may want to look at Lights Out or Power Manager 3, for more details of scheduled power events the aptly named widget - Energy Schedule from the Power Manager 3 crowd is handy and free.
