Do you sleep your Mac or turning it of after every work day?

kgdrum · Post by **kgdrum** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 11:55 am

i leave my mac on all the time(monitors go to sleep after 10 min)
1)cron stuff runs late at night from my understanding
2)i've been under the impression leaving hd's running is easier on hd's
3)if i am doing music then i turn on the rest of the system (esata seritek,magma etc...)
4)if system gets weird then i restart
KG

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 2:20 am

CRON scripts have run at 3:15AM for many years on OSX.

As I've been up late most (OK, all LOL) nights, I've become accustomed to and even comforted by the sound of a drive playin' the CRON script boogie.

groove · Post by **groove** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:43 am

monkey man wrote:CRON scripts have run at 3:15AM for many years on OSX.

As I've been up late most (OK, all LOL) nights, I've become accustomed to and even comforted by the sound of a drive playin' the CRON script boogie.

Onyx http://www.titanium.free.fr/

is a great freeware that has a among other features Maintenance options where you can activate the Mac OSX daily, weekly or monthly scripts, repair permissions, clean various caches etc..
Priceless like a Swiss army knife.

As for powering comsumption I turn everything off; the 10% thing is not a myth, just watch your electric counter spinning while everything is "sleeping" you'll be bemuse.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:59 am

Yeah, I used to use Cocktail, YASU, Onyx and MainMenu.
All good apps, IMHO.

When I upgraded to Leopard, I ran MainMenu, as it was the only UB maintenance app I had at the time.
I think it might have been responsible for the massive permissions issues I've experienced, so since the last reinstall I haven't touched maintenance apps.

When I've got the guts, I'll try all three apps again one day.

chadd · Post by **chadd** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:20 am

I use one of these: http://www.p3international.com/products ... 00-CE.html
to measure how much power various devices are using in sleep or standby mode.

I used to sleep my G4 because it was slow to boot and had developed a tendency to not mount Firewire devices after a cold boot. My new Mac Pro has neither of these issues, so I find I'm just shutting it down instead of putting it to sleep.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:09 pm

Oh boy, bee-in-bonnet time:

Cocktail, Onyx, MainMenu, YASU, MacJanitor ••“ every single one of these so-called maintenance "apps" is nothing but smoke, mirrors, and window-dressing. All they do is call up routines and shell scripts that already exist in OS X out of the box. There's no code involved ••“ they're all just AppleScripts with fancy GUIs. And some of 'em have fancy prices too.

Just to be clear on this: there's nothing any of these apps can do that you can't already do in OS X yourself. Cron jobs, for example:

1. Launch Terminal.

2. Type:

Code: Select all

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

3. Enter your admin password (carefully ••“ because you won't see it being entered in Terminal).

4. Hit Return.

When the prompt reappears in Terminal, you're done.

If you're not comfortable playing around in Terminal, get a free copy of Clix, available here:

http://rixstep.com/4/0/clix/

You'll never have to open Terminal. Launch Clix, find the command you want to run, and double-click. Educate and empower yourself. Jeez, I'm starting to sound like a salesman here so I'll just paste a paragraph from the website:

"The CLIX package includes a starter command database with over 1000 (yes, you read that right) system commands for investigating your system status, for cleaning out the junk files, for getting at secret settings for the Dock, the Finder, Spotlight, Dashboard, ExposÃ©, and all of your most used applications, and all sorted for easy access, any way you wish."

Kind regards.

groove · Post by **groove** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:04 pm

Dave Bourke wrote:Oh boy, bee-in-bonnet time:

Cocktail, Onyx, MainMenu, YASU, MacJanitor ••“ every single one of these so-called maintenance "apps" is nothing but smoke, mirrors, and window-dressing. All they do is call up routines and shell scripts that already exist in OS X out of the box. There's no code involved ••“ they're all just AppleScripts with fancy GUIs. And some of 'em have fancy prices too.

Just to be clear on this: there's nothing any of these apps can do that you can't already do in OS X yourself. Cron jobs, for example:

1. Launch Terminal.

2. Type:
Code: Select all
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
3. Enter your admin password (carefully ••“ because you won't see it being entered in Terminal).

4. Hit Return.

When the prompt reappears in Terminal, you're done.

If you're not comfortable playing around in Terminal, get a free copy of Clix, available here:

http://rixstep.com/4/0/clix/

You'll never have to open Terminal. Launch Clix, find the command you want to run, and double-click. Educate and empower yourself. Jeez, I'm starting to sound like a salesman here so I'll just paste a paragraph from the website:

"The CLIX package includes a starter command database with over 1000 (yes, you read that right) system commands for investigating your system status, for cleaning out the junk files, for getting at secret settings for the Dock, the Finder, Spotlight, Dashboard, ExposÃ©, and all of your most used applications, and all sorted for easy access, any way you wish."

Kind regards.

Dave,

a lot of people, myself included, don't want to mess with Terminal. What is the problem with working with a "fancy GUI". I used Clix once to debug an outgoing port for email and ended up using Terminal instead. As of today Onyx is as free as CLIX, is easier to use for what it does and does the job prety well.
Each is own.

Cheers

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Fri Feb 29, 2008 4:49 am

Obviously, everyone takes his own road.

Personally, I want to learn as much as possible about the tools I depend on every day, because knowledge is power. Onyx teaches me nothing. Clix does.

My post was simply to draw attention to another road, less travelled.

Kind regards.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Fri Feb 29, 2008 5:14 am

Dave, many of us (including myself) are aware of this; it's part of the reason these apps don't scare me, the fact that I know they're only running kosher processes.

I don't think I need 1000 scripts - between Onyx, Cocktail, YASU and MainMenu it's not difficult to find a set of tasks one likes.
Most of these apps have the ability to run a user-specified batch of tasks, something I've used as a shutdown routine for some years.

So, to sum up: Free, convenient, safe (if up to date)... and it's all in English.

croyal · Post by **croyal** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:18 am

In the same way that light bulbs only blow when turned on or off, audio equipment and computers seem to run with longer and hardware trouble-free lives when NOT turned off. Restarts are okay but sleep the screen, spin down drives and pay the power bill.

We've got a mail server at work that is an old 8100 that still works; it's been on for more than 10 years with no hardware issues. Restarts were used about twice a month just in case a crash was looming.

BTW drives are the main power draw. Unmount and let them spin down (don't turn off if external), saving years worth of cycles. and juice.

Chris

EMRR · Post by **EMRR** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 8:02 pm

This is much like the debate about audio equipment power. To me it comes down to the number of hours in use per day. It seems kinda crazy to run something 24/7 if you use it 10-20% of the time. Multiply your power bill by 0.2; how's that sound? Sure that's not exactly right, but not too far from the truth, either. Even the old radio guys who ran all tube stations years ago will generally admit to powering down everything if the off-air time exceeded 8 -10 hours, and that stuff requires significant warm-up time to operate correctly and not drift. Expensive do-or-die problems occured with that stuff, and still they shut it down. Capacitors in power supplies do dry up and fail from continual use, they have definite life spans defined by length of time power is applied. Same with cooling fans. The water analogy is always used with electrical current, and the erosion analogy applies too.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 8:06 pm

The argument used to be that turning off the computer every day shortens it life. Fact is, however, that the useful life of the machine AS HARDWARE is much longer than it's effective life in terms of obsolescence.

When I went out of town for 2 weeks, my electric bill dropped by $50 because I left the Mac off the entire time. So I say TURN IT OFF! Save $$$! ANd the planet...