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Jellytussle · Oct 28, 2005, 04:10 AM

So i'm playing around with my new 15" PB, and i run the battery right down so that it goes to sleep. In fact, it even loses the breathing sleep light after a few seconds. OK, i think, it's shut down ( a dismally regular occurrence with my old TiBook towards the end). So, i grab the power adapter, plug in, and hit the space bar.
The screen lights, but it's like there's a 50% white mask over the whole thing (like a KP goes grey, but white). Then a system icon bezel appears, but with no icon, just a progress bar along the bottom. And here's where my mind may be playing tricks, but the bar wasn't simply white squares a la the volume/brightness bezels, but larger, round ended rectangles (think the input level meter in the Sound system preference). It shows full progress after about 1.5 -2 seconds, and then the screen returns to normal and everything it fine.

So, what was that indicator? The new PB's run a different build of 10.4.2: 8E45. I search for every .png in /System/Library, and couldn't find the bezel i saw. Should i ease up on my medication, or increase the dose?

Tesseract · Oct 28, 2005, 04:24 AM

Yah, that's real.

The new PBs have a suspend-to-disk feature. Basically, before going to sleep, the PB writes the contents of memory onto the hard disk. Then, if the battery dies or is removed while the 'Book is sleeping, when power is restored, the memory contents will be read from the disk and refreshed. That's what's happening as you watch the progress bar bezel thing.

More here.

mpancha · Oct 28, 2005, 08:03 AM

I have mixed feelings about "safe sleep". It reminds me all too much of the pathetic Windows sleep/hibernate modes on laptops I see all the time. the newer laptops are pretty fast (I would say as fast as my iBook coming out of sleep, but most of the Windows laptops I encounter spend way too much time coming out of hibernate simply because all the data in RAM is written to the Hard Drive.

I hope Apple's implementation is better.

Tesseract · Oct 28, 2005, 09:51 AM

Note that "safe sleep" is a backup; if power isn't lost while sleeping you get the usual OS X ultra-fast wake time.

Horsepoo!!! · Oct 28, 2005, 10:21 AM

As Tesseract has said, Apple's implementation differs in that the backup is only used when power is lost.

And not only does the PowerBook wake up as fast as any other PowerBook when the power is not lost, it wakes up in 2-3 seconds or less when the power is lost.

Apple's wake-from-'hibernation' is much faster than Microsoft's and the PowerBook *only* 'hibernates' if power is lost (this considering 'sleep' on PowerBooks and iBooks seems to deplete a battery much more slowly than on PC laptops.)

Geobunny · Oct 30, 2005, 05:16 PM

Can you still swap batteries without incurring the new feature? On my (considerably ageing) 15" TiBook, if I take the battery out while it's sleeping, I can insert a fully charged one and then open the lid to have it usable again immediately.

Tesseract · Oct 30, 2005, 05:39 PM

Originally Posted by Geobunny

Can you still swap batteries without incurring the new feature? On my (considerably ageing) 15" TiBook, if I take the battery out while it's sleeping, I can insert a fully charged one and then open the lid to have it usable again immediately.

You can, as long as you do it quickly. A benefit of the new feature is if you take too long, the PB won't shut down (actually, it will, but it will be able to resume its previous state rather than booting the OS again).