[bokaroseani]

Hi, I am new to Mac OS x and am currently trying to figure out everything that I need to know about my brand new Macbook. I just found out that I have a feature called safe sleep similar to what Windows calls hibernate. When calibrating my battery, I noticed that the system goes to safe sleep when the battery is exhausted. Is there a way to activate "safe sleep" without having to wait till the battery runs dry?

[TETENAL]

Whenever your Macbook goes to sleep it does 'safe sleep'. There is no way to deactivate it. Of course your Macbook only has to wake up from safe sleep when the battery was exhausted or removed. Otherwise it can simply just wake up normally.

[bokaroseani]

Thanks. But what I understood by "safe sleep" was that its something like hibernating my laptop so that the battery is not getting used up to keep the RAM powered. When I close the lid, I go into safe sleep but I am still powering my RAM, right? So my question then would be: how do I dump the contents of the RAM to the hard drive and shut off power completely so that I can later start working where I left off just by turning my laptop on?

[hickey]

I think This might be what you're looking for.

[analogika]

No, that is not, and performing that hack could **** his system.

HIS MACHINE ALREADY DOES SAFE SLEEP.

What he's looking for is to kill the power supplied to the RAM to keep it from sucking the battery down while in sleep mode.

Of course, I wonder if that's really such a worthwhile exercise, since the battery will only deplete something like 1% per hour of sleep or so, meaning that a full battery will keep the machine in "regular" sleep for more than half a week.

[chabig]

As far as I know, the only way to keep the batter from draining while the machine is asleep is to remove it.

Chris

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by bokaroseani

When I close the lid, I go into safe sleep but I am still powering my RAM, right?

Yes, that's correct.

Originally Posted by bokaroseani

So my question then would be: how do I dump the contents of the RAM to the hard drive and shut off power completely so that I can later start working where I left off just by turning my laptop on?

You can't. And it's not worth to try and hack the system to get it to do it. Sleep is not significantly depleting the battery.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by chabig

As far as I know, the only way to keep the batter from draining while the machine is asleep is to remove it.

That, of course, is a possibility - briefly remove and replace the battery while the book is sleeping.

Not sure I see the point, unless you're in the jungle or so and will only turn on the machine in a very very brief timeslot (one that wouldn't allow you the time to just boot up the computer and open your documents) every few days, without any access to power in between...

Not a very probably scenario.

[Detrius]

This is a moot point. The added time and power consumption taken to copy the entire contents of your RAM to the hard drive and back again would negate any benefit gained from not powering the RAM while the machine is "sleeping." This is a 1 to 2GB hard drive copy that would have to be done twice.

This is a "feature" that was introduced on PCs because they couldn't get their machines to sleep like Apple does. Microsoft tried it, but it was really unstable. Mac users don't try to be PC-like. We are perfectly happy with what we have. Our machines go to sleep very quickly, and they also wake up very quickly--exactly where they were when we put them to sleep.