When you leave your Macintosh for a period of time, it's nice to know that others cannot look at or modify what's on the screen while you're away. Sleeper will allow you to secure your screen, requiring a password before allowing anyone to see data or use the mouse or keyboard.
Please note that this mechanism is not intended to thwart serious hackers, industrial spies, the Federal Government, or other truly nefarious sneaks. It is merely meant to deter casual passers-by. For more secure data protection, you should investigate a disk encryption or disk locking product.
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Setup
To turn on Sleeper's password feature, click on the Password tab in the Sleeper control panel, and turn on the Require password checkbox. Use the Set Password button to specify a new password. If a password was previously set, you will be required to enter the old password before being allowed to set a new one.
Sleeper can be set to ask for a password at different times, depending upon your work habits. Use the radio buttons on the password tab to choose between:
On screen saver wake-up: After the screen saver activates, Sleeper will require a password before it will undim the screen. Note that unlike other Sleeper settings that interact with a screen saver, this option will not work with other screen savers such as After Dark (which has its own password feature). It is specific to Sleeper's built-in screen saver.
On monitor power-up: Select this if you only want Sleeper to prompt for a password after the monitor has been powered down by Sleeper's Energy Star feature.
When idle for: Using this option allows you to select a delay separately from other sleep features. For instance, you can set the screen saver for 3 minutes, while only requiring a password after your Mac has been idle for 10 minutes. This can reduce the aggravation of being prompted for a password whenever you look away from your Mac, while still dimming the screen in a reasonably short period.
