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Mac

Hibernation on the Mac

As a Windoze user I was used to putting my notebook into hibernation. This has the following advantages over shutting the machine down or putting it into sleep:

  • Shutting the machine down means a long boot when I need it again, plus I have to open all apps and docs again which I was using when I shut it down.
  • Sleep mode eats up your battery quickly, because he machine is still running at a reduced power level.

However, I couldn’t find a menu item to put my Mac into hibernation, so I googled a bit and came across this Wikipedia entry.

Altho I agree that the way the Mac does it seems quite nifty (in fact IBM notebooks had this feature aeons ago…), I still wanted to be able to immediately put my Mac into hibernation. So I googled again and came across this nifty lil’ Apple script.

The tool works very well, I recommend it.

Update: My buddy Jochen just pointed me to a blog article he wrote recently. He discussed a preferences panel that allows you to configure how the Mac sleeps and/or hibernates. This is a nifty tool, but still doesn’t exactly do  what I need. I want to be able to immediately force the Mac into hibernation, and SmartSleep unfortunately cannot do that for me. 🙁