Scheduled System Shutdown

My home network is composed of about 15 machines. For a home network that’s pretty decent sized but it also means my electrical bills are starting to go through the roof. After reading this neat tip on TUAW I just had to setup all my Macs minus the notebooks so that at whatever time I specified they would shutdown. I can’t believe I didn’t see this feature before. I know for a fact that it’s built-into both Tiger and Panther and is extremely easy to configure.

In short, go into System Preferences, click the Energy icon. In Tiger you’ll see a button called ‘Schedule’, in Panther there’s a tab called Schedule. Both will show you the same options. From here you can choose when to start up the computer and then you can choose if you would like to sleep or shut down the computer and the time you’d like that to happen. Quite simple!

So now my Macs shutdown at 1:15am every morning and I have set my XServe to turn on at 7:15am every day and turn off at 1:15am. Surprisingly enough my power bill has started to go down!