figuring out "sleep"

I'm a macbook user, so I'm used to just closing the lid of my laptop to send it to sleep.

I've noticed that when I do this with the AA1, it runs out of battery very fast. Is there a more efficient sleep/suspend mode?

Grateful to anybody who will clue me in.

 

Are you sure it's actually going to sleep? This is almost like the "Is the light in the refrigerator on when the door is shut?" problem.

Overnight, I see about a 3-5% drop in battery charge for an unplugged AAO, which is actually slightly better than on the Macbook Pro I used to use. Within 60 seconds of closing the lid, you should hear the fan shut off. The fan on mine, unlike early AAOs, is fairly quiet, so I have to hold it up to my ear to hear (either that, or my hearing is going bad faster than I thought). If the fan doesn't shut off, it probably isn't going to sleep.

From the Aspire main menu, click the Settings button, then choose Power Center, and click the General Settings tab. At the bottom left corner of the settings panel, you should see "Button Events," which is actually a button, even though it doesn't look like one. The middle choice of the Button Events panel is labelled "Lid close Button." Choices are "Do nothing," "Standby," and "Shutdown."

You can also use Fn+F4 to put it to sleep, but that shouldn't be necessary. Note also that, for security, you can use Fn+F12 to lock the screen, requiring a password to access the machine. Password can be invoked automatically after the screen saver kicks in (as on Mac OS), but this is an annoyance. Manual screen lock is a nice middle ground -- as long as you remember to use it when appropriate.

 

Thanks a lot for the information! Relieved to see I'm doing things right. I will try to pay attention to how the battery is behaving.

Another thing -- I'm never sure how to wake it up. Space bar? Power button?

fn+f12 is sweet (anything equivalent in osx?)