Look son, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. Your MacBook—he hasn’t been feeling very well lately. It could be a bad update or maybe the way you dropped him down three flights of stairs, we may never know for sure. We’re going to have to put him to sleep.
But what kind of sleep? You may not know, but there’s more than one way to skin sleep a Mac. To explain to us the differences, Rob “I don’t sleep…I wait” Griffiths has posted this informative set of tips on the Mac OS X Hints blog.
Turns out that there are no less than five sleep modes for your Mac, each denoted by a number:
0 - Old style sleep mode, with RAM powered on while sleeping, safe sleep disabled, and super-fast wake.You can switch among them using the pmset command, as Rob explains in his article.
1 - Hibernation mode, with RAM contents written to disk, system totally shut down while “sleeping,” and slower wake up, due to reading the contents of RAM off the hard drive.
3 - The default mode on machines introduced since about fall 2005. RAM is powered on while sleeping, but RAM contents are also written to disk before sleeping. In the event of total power loss, the system enters hibernation mode automatically.
5 - This is the same as mode 1, but it’s for those using secure virtual memory (in System Preferences -> Security).
7 - This is the same as mode 3, but it’s for those using secure virtual memory.
I’ve had no problems with the default mode (3) on my MacBook—it works swell, and my Mac both sleeps and wakes with reasonable alacrity (somewhere, Macworld editor Dan Frakes is mocking me for using another English major word). Anyone a serious proponent of any of the other modes?
