More Details on Energy Saving Control Panels
Information on energy saving control panels that can automatically put many Macs to sleep (in a variety of ways) and that can restart soft-power Macs after a power failure continues to roll in after my articles about the topic in TidBITS-356 and TidBITS-357.
Pete Resnick <[email protected]> notes:
Auto Power On/Off appeared for the first time in System 7 Pro. The same version of the software (1.0) is still in the release version of System 7.5. Unfortunately, back in 1993 when System 7 Pro was in beta, a bug was discovered in Auto Power On/Off. Basically, it installs a patch to the system _SetDateTime routine, which is broken. Apple finally confirmed the bug (bug tracking number 1147889), but never fixed it. However, if you check out the release notes for Open Transport, you will see that when you use Auto Power On/Off in combination with Open Transport and my Network Time control panel, the system will hang because of that bug. Apple evidently has fixed the problem in the upcoming Harmony release (Mac OS 7.6), but until then, beware Auto Power On/Off.
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/inet/ network-time-201.hqx>
Vinnie Moscaritolo <[email protected]> writes:
As the author of the infamous Tech Note 1079 (Power Management & Servers) I would like to remind developers that calling into the Cuda manager can be problematic and tricky at times. It’s not recommended for novice developers (you can cause hardware damage).
The recommended procedure is to call into the Energy Saver API. Energy Saver attempts to consolidate all the power management functions that an application would generally need. It also provides a standard way to synchronize the various interfaces for all energy management features. As time goes on, I certainly hope you will see Energy Saver on more and more CPUs.
I’m making the final changes to another tech note on the Energy Saver right now, and it should be available for general developer consumption on my Web site by the time you read this.
Lloyd Wood <[email protected]> comments:
The $20 shareware Sleeper 2.1 from St. Clair Software gives you plenty of control over sleep and energy-saver times, installs the SAVR gestalt so that applications know that a screensaver is running, and can spin down your desktop Mac’s noisy hard disks, too, saving even more energy, just like a portable Mac. Sleeper has more control over the multiple energy-saving modes than anything else I’ve seen.
<http://www.stclairsw.com/slpr_bg.html>