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 ...