Anyone that knows me, knows I love to talk about freeware, I love to talk about menubar apps, and I love to talk about utilities that do one thing, but do it very well. Today I wanted to tell you about an application I found that’s a perfect trifecta, it’s called PleaseSleep from DragonOne Software.
PleaseSleep is a freeware Mac utility that sits in your menubar and does one thing, it controls how and when your Mac sleeps. That may not sound like an application that you need, but believe me, I sure needed it. My Mac Pro would never stay sleeping, within minutes of sleep, some network activity or timed activity on the hard drive would wake it up and the cycle would just continue. We all know that putting your Mac to sleep and waking it up again, over and over is not good for the hard drives. I needed a solution.
PleaseSleep can force your Mac to sleep. PleaseSleep sits in the background and waits for the sleep timer you set in Energy Saver preferences pane. Depending on the preferences you set, PleaseSleep will try to put your computer to sleep when the scheduled sleep timer kicks in. PleaseSleep is very easy to configure, you can enable, disable, and access its preferences via the system menu bar icon. You can choose to have PleaseSleep activates the sleep function on a regular basis, or you can tell PleaseSleep to activate the sleep function only when certain apps are running. You can also tell PleaseSleep to not activate the sleep function when certain apps are running. I find that feature really helpful when it comes time to run automated backups.
I can wake up the Mac Pro remotely from my iPad, iPhone or my MacBook Pro by running certain network applications I designated, and I can make certain that other network apps will not wake up my Mac Pro. Plus, now Unix executables can be added to the exceptions list.
PleaseSleep comes in a 64-bit Lion version and an older version for Tiger and Panther users. DragonOne does take donations for their software if you find it useful. I think it’s a handy application for everyone to keep in their Mac utility toolbox. Check it out at http://www.dragonone.com .
Tags: Mac, mac pro, pleasesleep, sleep
