If you have a fairly new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, and you put it to sleep a lot instead of shutting it down, you may notice that if it sleeps for less than an hour it wakes up fast. But if it sleeps for longer, it takes 10-15 seconds to wake back up again.

The screen comes on immediately, but it’s the screen from before the Mac went to sleep. You can’t actually do anything for those 10+ seconds.

Apple has set it up deliberately this way, to conserve battery life.

But if you find this as annoying as I do, you can change it. Here are step-by-step instructions on how.

1) Go into your Applications folder. Inside there is the Utilities folder. Inside there is an application called Terminal. Double-click on that.

2) In the black window that pops up, type this line exactly as I have it here:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 86400

Then hit return.

3) It will ask you for your computer password. Type it in and hit return. (It won’t look like you are typing, because the cursor won’t move, but the computer still knows what you’re typing.)

4) Quit out of Terminal.

5) Reboot your computer.

That’s it. Your computer should be waking up much faster, as long as it hasn’t been asleep for more than 24 hours. (86400 is how many seconds are in 24 hours, so if you want to adjust that number, go for it.)

Thank you to ewal.net for the Terminal command on how to do this. Read her post which contains lots more useful information.

Photo by Robert Nyman, from Flickr Creative Commons.