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November 27, 2006

tips

Safe Sleep tips and tricks

Posted Nov. 27, ’06, 1:30 PM PT by Collin Allen
Category | Tips

Safe SleepApple’s Intel-based Macs, and the last of the PowerBooks, include a new feature called “safe sleep.” Nearly identical to Windows’ “hibernation” mode, these machines can easily dump the contents of RAM to the hard disk and fall into a more permanent sleep mode. Normal sleep mode uses up battery power to maintain the contents of RAM (which will be lost if you run out of power), whereas safe sleep can continue indefinitely.

To quickly drop into safe sleep, Deep Sleep is a small Dashboard widget that will make it happen. A single click will suspend your Mac for future use while using up zero battery power. For Macs which don’t natively support safe sleep, Andrew Escobar details the Terminal steps necessary to enable this cool feature.

While the Mac has a number of sleep modes, safe sleep is great for when you’re on the go with a bunch of projects open and don’t want to shut the machine down, but sleep mode is too short — or you’re hard pressed to find a power outlet anywhere nearby.

[via LifeHacker, Macworld, and Andrew Escobar]


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