10 Green Tips to Save Energy for Your Mac

When everyone is taking global warming and energy efficiency pretty seriously, we have always been upto it with the likes of top 10 green gadgets and 15 ways to increase the life of your laptop batteries etc. If you are a Mac user, its impossible to stay away from its beautiful looks and style. That is a good thing. But the bad things is, we spend a lot of unnecessary power while using it. Now here are a few tips that will surely help you to save energy in your Mac.

1. Energy Saving

Apple’s Energy Usage Calculator estimates a 75 percent savings when using the Energy Saver features on a Mac Pro or iMac. So go for it.

You can set up your computer to sleep automatically when you don’t use it for a specified amount of time. Waking up from sleep is faster than starting your computer, no?

1. Open System Preferences and click Energy Saver.
2. If necessary, click the Sleep tab.
3. To set the overall time, drag the top slider.
4. To set a separate time for your display and your hard disk, select the checkbox, then drag the slider.
5. To have your computer automatically wake up when the modem detects an incoming call, click the Options tab and select the checkbox.

2. Use your HDD minimally

Suppose you are surfing through your favorite online store or working on social networking site, you don’t need your hard disk to spin essentially and on a high. Just check the box in the Energy Saver that has the option Put the hard disk to sleep when possible by not letting it spin when not required.

3. Unplug External Devices when not needed

We have so many external devices such as external hard disks, USB drives, digital cameras attached to our Macs all the time. They draw electric power constantly. Just unplug them when not needed.

4. Charge your laptop accordingly

Here is a trick. When you are charging your laptop, charge it to 100% and then unplug and start using it till it uses up some gas. Now plug it back again and charge to the full. This way, you will have a better battery life thereby saving the frequency of two subsequent charge-up. So, electricity will be used less.

5. Use better apps

Using better apps from the conventional Energy saver gives you a lot of other facilities. I will recommend you some.

a) Power Manager 3

Use Power Manager to ensure your Macs enter a low power sleep mode after short periods of inactivity. Unlike the Energy Saver software built into Mac OS X, Power Manager defines periods of inactivity clearly and enforces sleep regardless of rogue applications or processes.

• Power Manager will log out all users before shut down events.
• Power Manager will quit all applications before log out or shut down events.
• Power Manager will wake up a Mac to perform pending events.

Link

b) Faronics Power Save Mac

Power Save’s non-disruptive computer energy management analyzes CPU, disk, keyboard, mouse, and application activity before taking power management actions. It is also available for both Mac and Windows computers. Another cool app that you can try.

Link

c) Lights Out

Lights Out ($9.99) gives you more flexible power management than what’s offered in System Preferences. Use it to customize Energy Saver settings for specific apps, and even have the Mac shut down (instead of just going to sleep) after a specified period of idle time.

6. Check out your peripherals

1. If you have old peripherals - keyboards, mouse etc etc., just try and buy a new one coz the electronic gadgets, as they get old, tend to suck up more power, thereby it takes a toll on your effort to greenify your Mac.
2. Please stop using CDs now. They tax the entire system too much.
3. If you use a Mac machine, you have a good keyboard option on the gadget itself. use it. And if you have a backlit one, try and use it minimally and keep it off during the day.
4. When you shop for peripherals, look for the Energy Star designation. Energy Star is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, and it sets energy-efficiency standards.

7. Monitors

I didn’t include it into peripherals only because I didn’t want this to skip your eyes. If you don’t have a problem with its name, GO FOR LCD. CRT consumes too much of power, radiates too much of heat. I don’t recommend this at all and its one of the core aspects of saving energy now.

8. Printers

Please get rid of the age old ones if you have i.e. But anyway, if you are planning to buy one, get one with duplex printing option.  You save paper so you save trees and you save nature! Ever thought that way?

9. Save Ink

Where do we have an option for ink in the computer you may ask. You use a lot of it though in the papers you print from the works you do on your Mac. So, better to use eco friendly fonts (yes there are some believe me!) for your print outs.

1. GreenPrint:

   

   GreenPrint is designed to save you money and help the environment by preventing waste pages from being printed. GreenPrint analyzes the content of each print job for pages that have wasteful characteristics. These are the pages with just a banner ad, URL footnote etc. It also allows you to very quickly add and remove pages from your print job, without having to return to the original application.

2. EcoFont:

   
   Ecofont is such a project where researchers have tried and tested millions of experiments to use the optimum use of ink for a particular paper and they have come out with a result that uses up to 20% less ink

10. Our Consciousness

Despite using so many helps in machines (read: Software and apps), its ultimately our intelligence and consciousness which matter. If we are a bit liberal to adopt to these green technologies and energy saving processes, we can surely pride ourselves in being eco-friendly. That is something of a great value considering the bleak future that awaits us if we don’t feel enough for enviroment from now on. Stay well.

[thanks to macworld.com and maclife.com]