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g8minhquan · Oct 24, 2007, 03:14 AM

Hello,
I used to be a Windows users, recently I've moved to Mac.
In windows, there is a very useful feature : Hibernate.
Is there any way to hibernate the MacBook?
Thanks in advance

C.A.T.S. CEO · Oct 24, 2007, 03:29 AM

Originally Posted by g8minhquan

Hello,
I used to be a Windows users, recently I've moved to Mac.
In windows, there is a very useful feature : Hibernate.
Is there any way to hibernate the MacBook?
Thanks in advance

No.

richwig83 · Oct 24, 2007, 03:35 AM

Sleeps a way better solution anyway, shut the lid and it sleeps.... open it and its awake in a second!!!

I never used hibernate in windows... didn't see the point in it, as you still have to wait for it to boot!!

Just found this...
How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac - AndrewEscobar.com

Simon · Oct 24, 2007, 04:02 AM

What Windows calls hibernation is something a Mac will only do if it's asleep and runs out power (for example when you swap the battery on a portable Mac). Normally you just sleep your Mac. SafeSleep (the Mac name for hibernation) will make sure your RAM contents are preserved in case you lose power during sleep. But this happens behind the curtains, it's not something you have to trigger manually.

You can put your Mac to sleep by closing the lid (if it's a protable Mac), by choosing sleep from the Apple menu, by hitting cmd-alt/opt-eject, or by hitting cmd-power and then choosing sleep (or hitting s).

ghporter · Oct 24, 2007, 07:33 AM

A Mac's sleep is a lot better than Windows' suspend. It's faster in both directions and safer too. The only advantage of hibernate on a Windows machine is that it's at the computer's lowest power consumption level-but Macs consume only a tiny bit of power to maintain a sleep state, so that advantage is pretty minimal.

mduell · Oct 24, 2007, 04:56 PM

OS X sleep is just like Windows standby; OS X safe sleep is just like Windows hibernate.
The only difference is you get to pick in Windows, and in OS X it's forced.

g8minhquan · Oct 24, 2007, 11:50 PM

Thanks, everybody

The mechanism of hibernating is that all the content of RAM will be saved to hardisk, so we can save our opening apps. Standby, or Sleep in MacOS, is fast, but the computer is still consuming power and i think it's not very safe if we move the computer (the harddisk could be affected)
I think it's better if Mac provides some hibernate or SafeSleep

alex_kac · Oct 24, 2007, 11:57 PM

When the computer is asleep, the hard disk is parked. Mac sleep is *much* safer than Windows' standby. Its been in use for far longer than Windows - remember that.

Simon · Oct 25, 2007, 02:12 AM

The user has full control over the sleep settings in OS X, but there's no GUI frontend.

You can change the sleep mode from Safe Sleep to 'old-school' sleep with
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
To regain the disk space used by the no longer required sleepimage file you can also do a
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

OTOH
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
will turn Safe Sleep back on.

Needless to say you can do these changes on the fly. But if you just sleep your Mac (using Apple's default settings), contrary to Windows, OS X knows when to read back from the disk and when not with no extra user intervention required.

ghporter · Oct 25, 2007, 07:18 AM

I'm not sure what the exact mechanism is on a Mac, but on a PC, when you hibernate the boot source is changed to point to the hibernation file (typically in the root of the C: drive), which means your computer reboots when you wake it from hibernation. This is slower than waking a Mac from safe sleep-perhaps because there's a boot sequence involved on the Mac as well. Suspend is not quite "exactly like" sleep from a functional standpoint because there seem to be more systems operating on a PC in suspend (for example, even with "wake on LAN" disabled, my desktop's ethernet card is still live-which could be motherboard or card specific...).

Whatever the case, the implementation of these functions on Macs is much smoother, quicker, and seems to be more robust than in PCs. I've yet to experience or hear of a corrupt resume from ether form of sleep on a Mac, but I've had a number of incidents of really goobered up resumes from hibernate on more than one PC...

outthere · Oct 27, 2007, 01:04 AM

Originally Posted by g8minhquan

Thanks, everybody

...and i think it's not very safe if we move the computer (the harddisk could be affected)

is that true? i sleep my mbp and carry it to just about everywhere. am i screwed?

Simon · 05:46 AM

Originally Posted by outthere

is that true? i sleep my mbp and carry it to just about everywhere. am i screwed?

No. Carrying around your MB(P) while it's sleeping is nothing special. Countless people do it every day and as long as you don't drop or bang your MB(P) there's nothing to worry about. I have always carried my sleeping portable Macs around and that has never caused any trouble. If anything, just make sure it is actually sleeping before you start swinging it around (Safe Sleep needs to access the disk when you go to sleep and it can't do that when the disk is being accelerated). Your Mac was designed to be carried around. It was designed to sleep. And it surely was designed to do both at the same time. You paid for this design. Make use of it!

mduell · Oct 27, 2007, 12:12 PM

Is there any laptop today that's not intended to be carried/moved around even while it's on? That'd be an incredibly limited/foolish design.

Simon · Oct 27, 2007, 01:47 PM

There are a lot of foolish notebook designs. In my experience about half the PC notebooks I see actually.

ghporter · Oct 27, 2007, 08:29 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Is there any laptop today that's not intended to be carried/moved around even while it's on? That'd be an incredibly limited/foolish design.

There have been a few-they weren't called "laptops," but they were basically that, with no battery and a substantial power brick. Small footprint, low power usage, and so on mad them popular for particular markets. The new thing is a newer style of all-in-one, using laptop components for small size and low power-"the new" Gateway has a nice looking one. In fact, Dell's tiny desktop can actually mount on the back of the monitor to make it effectively this sort of thing, and it uses laptop components.