Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Logging Out, Shutting Down

If you’re the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

Sleep Mode

If you’re still shutting down your Mac after each use, you may be doing a lot more sitting around and waiting than necessary. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep:

• Choose →Sleep.

• Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12, if you don’t have an Eject key). In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23, click Sleep (or type S).

• Press the Power button on your machine. On many desktop models, doing so makes it sleep immediately; on laptops, you get the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23. (Then again, if you have a laptop, just closing the lid is a much quicker way to send it to bed.)

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting described in Section 8.12 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Restart

You shouldn’t have to restart the Mac very often—only in times of severe troubleshooting mystification, in fact. Here are a few ways to do it:

Figure 1-23. Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Enter for Shut Down.

• Choose →Restart. A confirmation dialog box appears; click Restart (or press Enter).

Tip

If you press Option as you release the mouse on the →Restart command, you won’t be bothered by an “Are you sure?” confirmation box.

• Press Control--Eject. (If you don’t have an Eject key, substitute F12.)

• Press Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23; click Restart (or type R).

Shut Down

To shut down your machine completely (when you don’t plan to use it for more than a couple of days, when you plan to transport it, and so on), do one of the following:

• Choose →Shut Down. A simple confirmation dialog box appears; click Shut Down (or press Enter).

Tip

Once again, if you press Option as you release the mouse, no confirmation box will appear.

• Press Control-Option--Eject. (It’s not as complex as it looks—the first three keys are all in a tidy row to the left of the Space bar.)

• Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12) to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23. Click Shut Down (or press Enter).

• Wait. If you’ve set up the Energy Saver preferences (Section 8.12) to shut down the Mac automatically at a specified time, you don’t have to do anything.

Log Out

If you share your Mac, you should log out when you’re done. Doing so ensures that your stuff is safe from the evil and the clueless even when you’re out of the room. To do it, choose →Log Out Chris (or whatever your name is). Or, if you’re in a hurry, press Shift--Q.

When the confirmation dialog box appears, click Log Out (or press Enter), or just wait for two minutes. The Mac hides your world from view and displays the Log In dialog box, ready for the next victim.

Tip

Last time: If you press Option as you release the mouse on the →Log Out command, you squelch the “Are you sure?” box.

Logging out is described in much more detail in Chapter 11.