Save Power – Use Energy Saver System Preference
Powering down your Mac as often as you can will save you money. Just how much? Use Apple’s Energy Usage Calculator to determine how much you energy your Mac uses on an annual basis. You will need a copy of a recent energy bill to see how much every kilowatt hour costs you.
The downside is the list only contains desktop Macs currently for sale, so you’re not going to be able to do calculations for your G5 iMac or laptop.
To start saving, navigate to your System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Drag the slider for “Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for” to the shortest period possible. The next one allows you to just sleep the display. Putting the display to sleep will save energy and extend it’s life.
The last option can set your startup and shutdown schedule. This is great for computers in an office, where people arrive and depart at the same time every day. I set all of our office machines to start up at 7:45AM and shut down at 5:15PM Mondays through Fridays. This way all employees working 8AM-5PM never have to worry about turning their computer on or off, and it cuts down on our energy bill.
Be considerate of things like evening backups when doing this in an office environment. Ask your IT department if they have any problems with an auto-startup/shutdown configuration before you enable it. In case of evening backups, they may be able to reschedule them to occur during the day.
