Hibernation in OSX?

Can you hibernate a MacBook much like you can hibernate other notebooks on windows XP?

I remember sleeping to be different from hibernation.

 

Sleeping = Hibernation on a Mac.

 

Uh, no.

On a mac you can "sleep" which is equivalent to "sleep" in the windows world. Everything except the RAM is powered down, so you get near instantaneous bring up of the machine. However, this still requires some power and will slowly drain the battery.

There is also "safe sleep" which is equivalent to "hibernate" in the windows world. The state of the machine is saved to disk and everything is shut down. There is no power draw while the machine is in safe sleep. Only newer mac laptops support safe sleep, but there are some hacks to activate it on older machines.

 

What foodle said. Unlike in Windows though, there's no quick way to switch between the two.

Safe Sleep is activated by default on new Macs (a pain since OSX rebuilds sleepimage even if you delete it, so you basically never recover those 2-4GB).

You can disable it manually via Terminal though.

 

Although I haven't tried them, there are some widgets that claim to allow you to drop into safe sleep at will (just like in windows). Do a search for "safe sleep" on apple.com and they'll come up. I think they're called Midnight and LightsOut.

 

I am not sure if this is still true of the Intel based Macs - but it used to be that Macs would last way, way longer than Windows machines in sleep mode. My Windows laptop has a 9 cell battery and barely lasts longer than 3 days in suspend mode whereas the old Powerbook could easily go 2 weeks and still have over 70% left.

I was so far unable to try this with the MBP because I am using it every waking moment...

Come to think of it would be hard to test since the newer Macs automatically enter hibernate mode at some point.

 

But on OSX, sleep & safe sleep isn't THAT big of a difference. Sleep still pretty much does the job unless you're about to run out of power.

 

The fact that sleep continues to drain the battery and safe sleep does not is a significant difference to some people (myself included).

 

Sleeping shuts off the hard disk right? So that means I can transport the book from class to class without worry (it can get REAL bumpy sometimes)? That was the reason why I hibernated. It completely turned off my notebook. I don't want to put my hard drive in unnecessary danger.

 

Yes, Sleep shuts off the hard disk. That's why everything is silent .

 

Safe sleep is on by default these days is OS X. The way it works is that OS X goes to sleep when you shut the lid, but also writes the contents of memory to the hard drive. This way, if power is lost, then you can still resume, though it takes longer.

You can also manually (through the command shell) tell OS X to just sleep, or just hibernate.

 

You can close your lid and transport it sleeping just fine, unless you really want to save power. OSX sleeping is very good when compared to that of Windows.

 

Oh! Okay! Thanks! Good news. I'll just sleep my laptop instead of turning it on every time and scrambling to open all my applications.