Far out! Another power management option for my Mac
The marketing and communications types over at developer Faronics of San Ramon, Calif., very gently informed me a few weeks ago that they have a very well established power management utility for the Macintosh platform. I had despaired of the few choices for the Mac a few months back when I wrote a blog about BigFix , a patch manager gone power manager. "What about Faronics?" they asked.
Indeed, Faronics is on version 2.0 of the PowerSave software product line, which now supports Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. The Power Save Mac 2.0 software includes intelligent shutdown functions; the ability to schedule when a system should be awake, asleep or in standby; the ability to customize what "inactivity" means for a particular system; enterprise control; and a reports feature that generates records of energy and cost savings. The report generator creates a "before" record of your computer, as well, which serves as a benchmark against which savings are calculated.
Faronics figures that software saves $25 per year per system on which it is used. Not bad, when you consider the standard edition of the software, with one year of maintenance, is roughly $14.40.
Oh, yes, Faronics Power Save 2.0 also runs on that other operating system, Windows.