Filed under: Hacks, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, PowerBook
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Joseph Matt said 11:42AM on 11-13-2005
Yes you can, infact I did it awhile ago with my friend's old 15" TiBook. The computer has enough power stored to stay in sleep mode to put a new battery in. What this new software thing does is allow you to completely shut down and not use any batter power and return to the last thing you were doing.
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Guillermo said 11:47AM on 11-13-2005
Regarding your side note: I just tried it on my 1.5GHz PowerBook. I closed the lid, removed the battery, waited a few seconds, put it back, opened the lid, and everything was just as I left them. So you can swap batteries while in regular sleep.
My question is how long does it take to wake up from this safe sleep? The thing I like about regular sleep is that it's instantaneous.
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Peter said 11:50AM on 11-13-2005
I believe its around 40 seconds for it to wake up from safe sleep.
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Balazs Hollos said 12:02PM on 11-13-2005
This worked fine for me, but I think I will disable it until I need to use it as I like the instant-on function of my Mac Mini. One thing to note is that during normal sleep mode my mac would display a pulsating light to show it is in sleep mode, but when in safe sleep the light is turned off.
Posted an article on my blog with a trial on my Mac Mini 1.42GHz: http://theminiblog.co.uk/archives/2005/11/12/put-your-mac-to-safe-sleep-hibernate/
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Jordan said 12:10PM on 11-13-2005
Will this hack show the progress bar like on the new Power Books?
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Ryan said 12:12PM on 11-13-2005
My PowerBook owners guide (You know, that thing nobody reads) told me about the battery swap feature. There is a small, rechargable lithium battery in the PowerBook. On the 15" it sits on top of the optical drive. I would say it's about the size of a watch (Not a watch battery, an actual watch). When you pop the main battery off, it just draws power from the other battery -- the sleep light even keeps going. You have about a minute or so to get another battery on.
This Safe Sleep is pretty cool, but I hope they didn't drop the internal battery -- regular sleep is a lot faster than Safe Sleep I bet, and if you are swapping your battery in the middle of a class or meeting you want to do it as fast as possible.
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Dan said 12:16PM on 11-13-2005
Just timed a new PowerBook. Three minutes reserve power after removing the battery. About thirty seconds from pressing power to password prompt. Yes, PowerBooks have long had hot-swappable batteries.
Interesting to note: Apple's support pages lists this feature for the new 15" PB, but makes no mention of the 17". Find it at the bottom of this calibration guide. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284
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Ricky said 12:19PM on 11-13-2005
it works fine with my iBook G4 12" 1.33ghz
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Brad said 12:22PM on 11-13-2005
Neat trick, but as it's finals week, I won't try to do this just yet as I don't want to lose all the work that I've got done so far.
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code said 1:39PM on 11-13-2005
Works great on my iBook G4.
It just takes about 10 seconds from pushing the power button to be up and running again. It's great.
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writedawg said 2:08PM on 11-13-2005
Worked great on my iBook G4 933mhz
Does show the progress bar - no pulsing light during safe-sleep
Wakes up well for me, maybe 14-17 seconds. The freeze-state upon wake up is fine - right down to cursor position.
Screen gives a weird flash upon wake up - lines of randomness.
Also remembers where I am in a song in iTunes and can resume.
Only wakes up when the 'power' button is pressed - not the space-bar or other buttons.
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John Laur said 2:17PM on 11-13-2005
Can anyone tell me if they can get this to work on a mac mini? Hibernate on a mini-based Car PC would be completely ideal, and my brother is about to complete his install. He's out of town or i'd try it myself.
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Oliver said 3:20PM on 11-13-2005
does anyone know if the 12" powerbook have the battery swap feature?
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Callum Alden said 3:21PM on 11-13-2005
iBook G3 900Mhz is a no-go. Working fine on the Mac Mini 1.42 - Strange things happening on my 333Mhz iMac however... maybe I should go back to OS 9. :D
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Mathew said 3:23PM on 11-13-2005
Here's where the hack first came from...
http://matt.ucc.asn.au/apple/machibernate.html
And the best explanation of whats going on in the background (for those who don't like typing random things into the open firmware)
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Mathew said 3:28PM on 11-13-2005
oh and here's a video of it in action.
http://www.applejustworks.com/ajw/geek/SafeSleep.mov
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Rom said 5:03PM on 11-13-2005
It 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
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Guy Lapointe said 5:08PM on 11-13-2005
Who's gonna write a nice small Apps to enable to fine feature without having to type in Termianl?
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Rahul Kishore said 6:09PM on 11-13-2005
This 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
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Berklee said 6:46PM on 11-13-2005
Oliver: The 12" Powerbook does not have the battery hot-swap feature.
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