Saving Money

Learn why it is important to configure your Macintosh’s Energy Saving features to your needs.

Different Users, Different Tastes

Every user is different. The advice below is designed to act only as a guide. The best way to find out what suits you is to experiment.

By configuring Power Manager and the Energy Saver settings for your Macintosh you can actively reduce running costs, save money and help the environment.

If you have any queries about the benefits of particular settings please contact us at support@dssw.co.uk

The following tutorials are designed to help you master some of the possibilities Power Manager unleashes.

If you need specific help for a particular configuration or would like advice on how to use Power Manager in your computing environment then email us at support@dssw.co.uk.

As Power Manager develops we will be adding to our tutorials to further enhance your use of the package. If you have any good tips or strange uses for Power Manager then why not share them with other users by emailing us at support@dssw.co.uk.

Public Mac - Multiple Users eg School or Lab.


Setting	Value	Reasoning
Sleep Timings
System Sleeps After	On, 40 minutes	By remaining on your users can instantly see if the machine is free for use. A dimmed monitor will put off unsure users.
Separate Timing for Display	No	Sleep when the system sleeps.
Separate Timing for Hard Drive	No
Never Spin Down Hard Drive	No
Notification
Play a Sound On Wake Up	Yes	Some monitors will take a few moments to warm up. The sound will play instantly thus providing feed back for the user.
Mute Sounds While Asleep	Yes	In a public building or room sounds coming from a sleeping Mac can be distracting.
Notify On Shut Down	Yes	The user should be given enough warning to save their work.
Display Text Message	No	By not showing the dialog box the user can not delay or cancel the shut down as easily. The Mac will not shut down until the predefined amount of idle time has passed.
Display a Blinking Icon in the Menu Bar	Yes	This will enable the user to easy recognise that the Mac is preparing to shut down.
Play A Sound	Yes	This will notify users not concentrating on the screen that a shut down is about to occur.
Advanced
Automatically Restart After Power Failure	No	If the power has failed you may need to monitor the equipment before inviting users back on the terminals.
Minutes Before Shut Down Notification	15 Minutes
Idle Time Required Before Shut Down	15 Minutes

Expert Tip: If you wish to stop users for accessing the Power Manager settings just remove the control panel from the Macintosh. You will need to reinstall the control panel again to amend the settings though! At no time should you remove the extension from the Extensions folder.

Server Mac - Single User eg Server Admin.


Setting	Value	Reasoning
Sleep Timings
System Sleeps After	On, 30 minutes	The server should sleep as soon as possible when not being directly used by the administor.
Separate Timing for Display	On, 10 minutes	Remember to turn off screen savers - no need to waste processor cycles for updating the screen or disk reads for graphical information.
Separate Timing for Hard Drive	No
Never Spin Down Hard Drive	Yes	By not spinning down the hard drive read requests can be handled instantly. A spun down hard drive will take a few moments to spin back up to speed - thus reducing the performance of the server.
Notification
Play a Sound On Wake Up	Yes
Mute Sounds While Asleep	Yes
Notify On Shut Down	Yes
Display Text Message	Yes	The administrator will be given the option of delaying the shut down or canceling it via this dialog box.
Display a Blinking Icon in the Menu Bar	Yes
Play A Sound	Yes
Advanced
Automatically Restart After Power Failure	Yes
Minutes Before Shut Down Notification	20 Minutes	Ensure that the administrator is prewarned of a shut down.
Idle Time Required Before Shut Down	30 Minutes	Ensure that all clients have finished being served.