. Energy Saver The Energy Saver program helps you and your Mac in a number of ways. By blacking out the screen after a period of inactivity, it prolongs the life of your monitor | . Energy Saver The Energy Saver program helps you and your Mac in a number of ways. By blacking out the screen after a period of inactivity it prolongs the life of your monitor. By putting the Mac to sleep half an hour after you ve stopped using it Energy Saver cuts down on electricity costs and pollution. On a laptop Energy Saver extends the length of the battery charge by controlling the activity of the hard drive and screen. Best of all this pane offers the option to have your computer turn off each night automatically and turn on again at a specified time in anticipation of your arrival at the desk. . Sleep Tab The Energy Saver controls are very different on a laptop Mac and a desktop. On a desktop Mac you see a pair of sliders on a laptop you have to click Show Details to see them Figure 9-11 . Figure 9-11. Top Here s what Energy Saver looks like in its expanded condition on a laptop. On a desktop machine it s far simpler. In the Put the display to sleep option you can specify an independent sleep time for the screen. Bottom Here are the Schedule controls a welcome return of the Mac s selfscheduling abilities. In any case the top slider controls when the Mac will automatically go to sleep anywhere from one minute after your last activity to Never. Activity can be mouse movement keyboard action or Internet data transfer Energy Saver won t put your Mac to sleep in the middle of a download. At that time the screen goes dark the hard drive stops spinning and your processor chip slows to a crawl. Your Mac is now in sleep mode using only a fraction of its usual electricity consumption. To wake it up when you return to your desk press any key. Everything you were working on including open programs and documents is still onscreen exactly as it was. To turn off this automatic sleep feature entirely drag the slider to Never. Note On Macs of old the beauty of the independent Put the display to sleep slider was that you could make the screen go dark before the .
