Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Logging Out, Shutting Down

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.

Sleep Mode

If you’re still shutting down your Mac after each use, you may be doing a lot more waiting than necessary. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse.

To make your machine sleep, do one of the following:

• Close the lid. (Hint: This tip works primarily on laptops.)

• Choose →Sleep. Or press Option-⌘-.

• Press Control-. In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4, click Sleep (or type S).

• Press the power button () on your machine. On desktop models, doing so makes it sleep immediately; on laptops, you get the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4.

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting in System Preferences will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Tip

Ordinarily, closing your MacBook’s lid means putting it to sleep. And, ordinarily, putting it to sleep means cutting it off from the world. In Mountain Lion, though, a feature called Power Nap lets your Mac stay connected to your network and to the Internet, even while it’s otherwise sleeping. It can download email, back up your stuff, download software updates, and so on. For details, see Checkbox Options.

Figure 1-4. Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Return for Shut Down.

Restart

You shouldn’t have to restart the Mac very often—only in times of severe troubleshooting mystification, in fact. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose →Restart. A confirmation dialog box appears; click Restart (or press Return).

  Tip

  If you press Option as you release the mouse on the →Restart command, you won’t be bothered by an “Are you sure?” confirmation box.

• Press Control-⌘-.

• Press Control- to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4; click Restart (or type R).

Shut Down

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

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

  Tip

  Once again, if you press Option as you release the mouse, no confirmation box appears.

• Press Control-Option-⌘- (It’s not as complex as it looks—the first three keys are all in a tidy row to the left of the space bar.)

• Press Control- to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4. Click Shut Down (or press Return).

• Wait. If you’ve set up the Energy Saver preferences to shut down the Mac automatically at a specified time, then you don’t have to do anything.

The “Reopen windows” Option

In the Shut Down dialog box illustrated in Figure 1-4, you’ll notice a checkbox called “Reopen windows when logging back in.” That simple box does something very useful: The next time you start up your Mac, every running program, and every open window, will reopen exactly as they were at the moment you used the Restart or Shut Down command. The new option gives the Mac something like the old Hibernate feature in Windows—and saves you a lot of reopening the next time you sit down to work.

If you turn off that checkbox when you click Restart or Shut Down, then your next startup will take you to the desktop, with no programs running. And if you want the Mac to stop asking—if you never want your programs and windows to reopen—then open →System Preferences→General and turn off “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps.”

Log Out

If you share your Mac with other people, then 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, press Return, or just wait for 2 minutes. The Mac hides your world from view and displays the login dialog box, ready for its 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. 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 14.

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 saved mouse clicks can really add up.