How to Automate Your Mac’s Sleep Cycle

Automating the sleep cycle of your Mac can be useful for many things, but first, let me explain what I mean by automating it’s sleep cycle.  With the right know-how you can make you mac automaticly turn itself on and off.  Thats right, you can make it shut it’s self down, boot it’s self up or go into sleep.  On top of this you can set a time, you can set a day.  You can choose weekdays or weekend only.

What does this mean?  Your mac will be ready when you are.  Regardless of weather you have pressed the button or not.

For those who use MacBook’s please note that this will only work when it is connected to the mains, otherwise it might turn on it your bag.

Get to the point – How do I do it?

That, is surprisingly simple.

  1. Go to Apple Menu/System Preferences
  2. Under Hardware, select Energy Saver
  3. Now locate the “Schedule…” button near the bottom and click it
  4. Now you will be presented with the following screen:

    Simple check the first box to have it automatically turn on, and the second to have it automatically turn off.  Then, just choose your day and time options accordingly.  Worried about it shutting down or sleeping while you are using your Mac?  At the selected time for shut down a box will appear.  It gives you ten minutes to click cancel in order to stop you Mac from shutting down, otherwise it will go ahead as scheduled and shut down.
  5. Thats it!  Just click OK and your Mac is scheduled.

Now, this is all well and good, except for a lot of us it is pointless have our Mac turn on if we are not logged in straight away.  Obviously, I don’t want to expose my account either though by removing that valuable password protection.  I have also come up with a solution for this, as personally I want to have Front Row launched so I can take control from my bed with my Apple Remote.

To have it login without compromising your computer or yourself do the following:

  1. Go to Apple Menu/System Preferences
  2. Under System select Accounts
  4. Create your account, it does not matter what it’s called, and although recommended a password is 100% optional.  Make sure that the account is a standard account and not and administrator account.  
  5. Set the account to be automatically logged into.  To do this select login options from the bottom of the sidebar and then select the correct account from the “Automatic Logon” box.  You may then be prompted for the accounts password if you set one.  
  6. Done.  Thats all there is too it, not too bad was it?

If, like me though you want Front Row to be running automatically so that anyone in your house can quickly pick-up the remote and start using it you will need to set it to automatically launch on logon, but this post is long enough for one day so I will add this in the near future.

How are you using this feature of OS X?  Let us know by commenting below.

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