Here's a quickie, but I showed this to Venkat, and it made his day, so chances are good that others don't know about this handy keyboard shortcut. I used to always rely on my PowerBook to go to sleep successfully when I close the lid. But every once in a blue moon, something doesn't work right, and I open my laptop bag to a red-hot laptop. I suspect that it's latch related (and several other folks have suggested that this was the case). Now, I've taken to putting my machine to sleep before closing the lid. There are of course a variety of ways to do that; my recent common one was to hit the power button, which gives you the shut-down options dialog, and sleep is one of them. That's what Venkat's been doing.
But I recently ran across a better combination: Apple-Alt-Eject provides instant sleep (the Eject key is the one that ejects CD's, just above the delete key). One keyboard chord, and I have a sleeping laptop. I love it when I can cut a 2-step process down to a single keychord!
4 comments:
Nice, thanks for the tip. I used to use a quicksilver script (that I think comes with the "Extra Scripts" plugin) to put my computer to sleep, but sometimes quicksilver gets horked up and I need to do some yak shaving to relaunch quicksilver just so I can put my computer to sleep. Now I can just use the cmd-opt-eject keycombo. Much better!
Nice one. I used the combo Ctrl + Eject to pop up the shutdown dialog and then hit the 's' key for sleep.
I think I'll start using this one from now on.
That's an excellent tip, thanks for posting it. Why isn't it common knowledge? Why isn't it a self documenting feature of the OS?
Another useful key combination along these lines, is the Ctrl-Shift-Eject, which turns off the display, without logging off or starting the screen saver, when you just want to quickly turn off the monitor.
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