Safe Sleep for the rest of us
With the latest iteration of PowerBooks Apple just released, a new feature called Safe Sleep was introduced that Fabienne covered a couple weeks ago. In case you missed it, the short of the long of this handy new feature is that it works like the Hibernate feature of Windows: you can save a snapshot of what you're working on to your hard drive and completely power down the notebook - meaning you can swap out batteries and power back up to your desktop as you left it in about 10 seconds, or simply store the notebook without draining any power, like the regular Sleep feature does.Since this new feature is so handy, some Mac users out there were determined to claim it for the rest of us and it appears they were successful: on Digg.com I found a blog entry detailing the fact that this new Safe Sleep feature is entirely software based - so they've figured out how to enable it for the rest of us and have posted a tutorial. (It's reported this works on iBook G4's and PowerBook G4's, but it isn't necessarily limited to those models.) As always: back up your stuff before doing this. It sounds like a fairly painless procedure (though I haven't tried it yet) but there is never a good reason not to back your stuff up. For those of you who try this out, please post your experience in our comments for the rest of the class.
Side note: I thought you could do something similar to this already with the 15" and 17" PowerBooks, where you could set the book to regular sleep, pop out the battery and you had 90 seconds of stored power to pop a new one back in. I've seen this demonstrated, but I can't find any documentation on how to do it. If anyone has info on what I'm talking about, I'm sure we'd all love it if you could post that too.
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With the latest iteration of PowerBooks Apple just released, a new feature called Safe Sleep was introduced that Fabienne covered a couple...
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Ditto what Ryan said. Yawn, this is just another "deep sleep" redux. If this is an excuse for getting rid of the reserve battery (as they did in the 12" PB), that's a pretty sucky solution. Not to mention, "safe" is a misnomer. Suppose you don't have time to wait and close and toss the PB into a bag while it's writing to the hard drive. Uh-oh. I like how Sleep works now. Why copy needless features from the Windows world?
November 15 2005 at 12:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe clock on my 15" 1.67GHz stops running when safe sleep is enabled. Anybody else notice this? When the mac wakes up, it thinks it's the exact same time as when it went to sleep.
November 14 2005 at 12:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWorked very well on my PowerBook G4 12" 1Ghz
November 14 2005 at 12:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAlso handy if you're going to be away from your desktop Mac for a while, or want to unplug it and move it etc. Does anyone know if it actually works on the iMacs and PowerMacs?
November 14 2005 at 11:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replythanks for clearing that up Berklee :-)
November 14 2005 at 1:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe battery swap feature is present in all 15" and 17" Powerbooks, but not 12" Powerbooks or any iBooks. According to the paper manual that came with my PB, the internal batter will last for 3 minutes. I'm not sure how long this feature has been around, but I think it's bee for some years.
November 13 2005 at 10:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyOliver: The 12" Powerbook does not have the battery hot-swap feature.
November 13 2005 at 6:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWho's gonna write a nice small Apps to enable to fine feature without having to type in Termianl?
November 13 2005 at 5:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIt does work on 1.67Ghz 15" powerbook (jan 05). However, I have had varied performances upon waking up. I reverted back to the normal Sleep mode since I practically have no use for the Safe sleep mode until 10.4.4. :D
November 13 2005 at 4:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis is a great trick, I have a 15" Powerbook G4, 1.5 GHz, and it wakes up from safe sleep in about 15 secs, I would think regular sleep is probably more useful for the average user, but this is a nifty trick should you run out of battery on the go. Great post
November 13 2005 at 3:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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