Section 1.3. On, Off, and Sleep

1.3. On, Off, and Sleep

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.

1.3.1. Sleep Mode

It's clear that Apple expects its customers not to shut down their machines between sessions, because the company has gone to great lengths to make doing so inconvenient. (For example, you have to save your work in all open programs before you can shut down.)

That's OK. Sleep mode (called Standby on the PC) consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and in memory, and wakes the Mac up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep, use any of these techniques:

• Choose Sleep. (The menu, available no matter what program you're using, is at the upper-left corner of your screen.)

• Press the Power button on your machineor, if you don't have one easily accessible, press Control-Eject key. On some models, doing so makes the Mac sleep immediately; on others, you have to click Sleep in the dialog box that appears (Figure 1-3).

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver control panel described on Section 13.11.4 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Figure 1-3. 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.

1.3.2. Restart

You shouldn't have to restart the Mac very often. But on those rare occasions, including severe troubleshooting mystification, here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose Restart. Click Restart (or press Enter) in the confirmation dialog box.

• Press the Power button or Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-3, if your Mac doesn't automatically go to sleep. Click Restart (or type R).

• If all else fails, press Control- -Power key. (On newer keyboards that lack a power key, use Control- -Eject instead.) That restarts the Mac instantly, but you lose any chance to save changes in your open documents.

1.3.3. Shut Down

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

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

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

• 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.

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

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1.3.4. 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 Log Out (or 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 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.

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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 each time can really add up.

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