Turning It All Off

All Macs have to do a little internal housekeeping whenever you shut them down. Here's how to turn off your computer:

• Take your mouse and point to the Apple menu (that thing on the top of the screen with an Apple icon), and then click and hold. Then move the cursor to Shut Down and release the button, to select it. Within a few seconds, the computer will comply and turn itself off.

If you listen carefully after the Shut Down command is engaged, you'll hear the hard drive on your computer churning a little bit. That's normal. The Mac OS is designed to do a few chores with the drive before the computer is ready to turn itself off.

The Sleep function is used to put your computer into a low-power mode. The screen will darken , but the computer will still be on, and a simple press of any key on the keyboard will restore it to life. Anything you worked on before it went to sleep will still be there, ready to be worked on again. If you're planning on using your computer later that day, Sleep is fine and your computer will be up and running a lot faster than shutting it down and turning it on again.

If you accidentally shut off the computer by pulling the power cord, or there's a power failure, in most cases it will work just fine the next time you start it up. If you happened to be working with a file at the time, there's always the possibility the file might have become damaged, or there might be minor damage to the hard drive's catalog directory, so just be careful.