Does anybody know how to change this? -- (scheduled shutdown)

[ziggyonice]

I have my computer set to restart everyday at 5:30 p.m. It gives the user a 10-minute countdown before shutting down.
Does anyone know of a way to change this to say, 60 seconds?

Thanks.

EDIT: I've given up. Any ideas for a third-party program that will reboot my computer?

 

[gr8tfly]

I looked around some plists, but couldn't find anything (which doesn't mean it's not somewhere...).

Off topic: Just out of curiosity, what's the reason for the restart?

 

[ziggyonice]

Just out of curiosity, what's the reason for the restart?

Well, the short of it is that I work for a company that allows customers to use open, public computers. All of these computers are Macs, and they all have software pre-installed which prevents any changes customers make to be permanent. But for the machines to reset any changes, they have to be restarted. While I'd like to have them reboot in the middle of the night, management won't allow it because they feel that leaving the machines running after hours wastes power (I guess they don't understand how I can schedule the machine to turn on/off). So I have the computers reboot right smack in the middle of the evening, just before we kick all the customers out. If any customers are on the computers at the time of the warning, they'll click to cancel. But because the warning is on the screen for 10 minutes, many other customers will walk up to one of the machines during this time, canceling the reboot, and thus not resetting the computer for the following day. Hence the reason why I'd like to limit the timer to, say... 60 seconds.

(Okay, that turned out to be a lot longer than I thought!)

The setup for scheduling restarts is part of the Energy Saver preference in System Preferences...
I wonder if I can find it by checking the files within that preference pane.
EDIT: Well, didn't find anything there.

 

[gr8tfly]

Well, the short of it is that I work for a company that allows customers to use open, public computers. All of these computers are Macs, and they all have software pre-installed which prevents any changes customers make to be permanent. But for the machines to reset any changes, they have to be restarted. While I'd like to have them reboot in the middle of the night, management won't allow it because they feel that leaving the machines running after hours wastes power (I guess they don't understand how I can schedule the machine to turn on/off). So I have the computers reboot right smack in the middle of the evening, just before we kick all the customers out. If any customers are on the computers at the time of the warning, they'll click to cancel. But because the warning is on the screen for 10 minutes, many other customers will walk up to one of the machines during this time, canceling the reboot, and thus not resetting the computer for the following day. Hence the reason why I'd like to limit the timer to, say... 60 seconds.

(Okay, that turned out to be a lot longer than I thought!)

The setup for scheduling restarts is part of the Energy Saver preference in System Preferences...
I wonder if I can find it by checking the files within that preference pane.
EDIT: Well, didn't find anything there.

Thanks - my curiosity was satisfied.

I'll poke around some more - I hate to be out done by computers

I know the software - it's probably the same as Apple uses in-store. At least, it accomplishes the same thing.

 

[ziggyonice]

I found a ton of interesting threads in:
/System/Library/System Configuration/PowerManagement.bundle/Resources

There's a lot of things within those files that indicate sleep time, automatic restart on power loss, and system sleep timer. I'm assuming these values are the ones indicated in the Energy Saver settings though, as I still don't see anything regarding the schedule.

 

[ziggyonice]

Okay, so I think I've given up on trying to find how to change this. So time for an alternative! Does anyone have a good suggestion on a program that might do this for me? I just need an application that basically accomplishes the same thing.

Thanks.

 

[gr8tfly]

Okay, so I think I've given up on trying to find how to change this. So time for an alternative! Does anyone have a good suggestion on a program that might do this for me? I just need an application that basically accomplishes the same thing.

Thanks.

I didn't find anything to modify, either.

I do have a suggestion on how to implement the scheduled restart with the custom warning message:

Write an Applescript to put up the 60 second warning dialog, then tell the finder to restart (I saw quite a few examples of scripting shutdown/restart).

To run the script on schedule, I think "Lingon" will do that for you. I used it to launch an Automator Workflow and it was very easy to setup.