Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

chapter 1: how the mac is different 17

• Press the Power key or Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure

1-3; click Shut Down (or press Enter).

• As a last resort, hold down the Power key for about five seconds. The Mac will shut

down in a snap, but you’ll lose any unsaved work.

Note: The Macintosh has no equivalent of the modern PC’s Hibernate mode.

Log Out

If you share your Mac with other people, you should log out when you’re done. Doing

so ensures that your stuff is safe from the evil and the clueless when you’re out of the

room. To do it, choose aÆLog Out (or press Shift-c-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 login dialog box, ready for the

next victim.

Another option is to use fast user switching—a feature that lets you switch from one

user to another without actually logging out, just as in Windows XP. With fast user

switching turned on, your Mac can have several people logged in at once, although

only one person at a time actually sees his own desktop.

In either case, this whole accounts system is described in much more detail in Chapter

12.

Tip: If you press the Option key as you release the mouse when choosing the Restart, Shut Down, or Log

Out commands, you eliminate the “Are you sure?” confirmation dialog box. The mouse clicks you save ...