Energy Saver Preferences

My MacBook at work sits on my desk all day and all night. When I sit down to work on it, I expect it to be ready for me, and ready to ask how high when I tell it to jump. I get a bit annoyed if I come back after a few minutes or an hour and find that the Mac has gone to sleep while I’ve been gone. So, I spent a few minutes in the Energy Saver preference pane to configure the machine to my schedule.

First, yes, my battery is shot. I should get that replaced, but since the Mac never leaves my desk, I don’t see it as being a big deal. This is a 2007 MacBook Pro, she’s got some miles on her, but she’s still snappy at just about everything I want to do. I run Windows XP in VMware Fusion, and am running the latest OS X with no problems. One thing that takes a while for it to do though is wake from sleep. I can hear the CD-ROM being accessed when it wakes up, and it always takes longer than I’d like. So, when I’m working on the machine, I never let it go to sleep. However, being at least somewhat energy conscious, I want the machine to go to sleep at night when I’m not around. So, I’ve dragged the slider for “Computer sleep” over to 3 hrs, which gives me plenty of time for meetings and a mid-day lunch without the Mac going to sleep.

I let the display go to sleep after ten minutes. I find that it is rare that anything I will be reading on screen will take more than that.

The Schedule button in the lower right is a gem. From here I have the Mac wake up from sleep every day at 7, right as I’m sitting down to work. I also have the Mac reboot every week, midnight at Saturday. I do not necessarily believe that OS X generally needs to reboot that often, but given how much I do with mine, and the age of the system, I would rather have it reboot automatically while I’m not around than need to do it during the day when I am.

I also have the software updates set to automatically download and install in the background. Combined with my scheduled weekly reboots, this setup should give me a clean running, up to date Mac to get things done with.

So far, so good. I have not seen anything wrong with this setup yet.