Using Your Computer's Power-Management Features

Whether you are using a Mac or PC, a laptop or a desktop, your computer has power-management features that can help you save money, reduce your impact on the environment, and extend the life of your hardware.

Last week, we advocated shutting (or powering) down your computer if you weren't planning on using it for a period of two or more hours. This week, we'll introduce you to your computer's energy-saving features, which you can use even if you're only stepping away from your computer for as little as 15 to 20 minutes.

Choosing the Right Settings

On its Web site, Climate Savers Computing, one of the leading power-management advocacy organizations in the United States, recommends the following power-management settings:

• Monitor/display sleep: Turn off after 15 minutes or less.
• Turn off hard drives/hard disk sleep: 15 minutes or less.
• System standby/sleep: After 30 minutes or less.

Since instructions for enabling built-in power management vary by operating system, CSC has created a helpful Energy Saver Guide to walk you through the process based on your operating system.

Advice for IT Managers

If you are an IT manager, there are many ways to ensure that sleep settings don't interfere with software updates or backups across your network. If you are proactive and set these features yourself, you may avoid the hassles that can result when well-intended users set them in a way that interferes with your work.

Energy Star advise that IT managers do the following:

• Configure client computers to apply software patches and updates as soon as computers become available on the network.

• Windows Task Scheduler can wake up sleeping computers for updates. Scripts distributed via Active Directory allow one to centrally manage these "scheduled tasks."
• With Wake-on-LAN activated, a network administrator can wake up sleeping computers at any time in order to perform on-demand software patches or updates.

Putting Your Computer to Sleep Quickly

What if you don't have time to readjust your settings? The following commands can help you put your computer to sleep immediately, overriding your power-management settings:

• Apple. Choose Sleep from the Apple menu or click Sleep after pressing the power key. For information putting to sleep a Mac OS 9 or earlier, see Energy Saver: Sleep and Idle Contrasted in Mac OS 9 and Earlier.
• Windows. Choose Shutdown from the Start menu, then choose Standby or Hibernate from the dropdown. Some Windows machines also have function keys to put the computer to sleep. Hold down the Fn key and press the appropriately labeled function key.
• Most Laptops. Close the lid of the portable computer.