When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I said that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so many times that it was basically useless. I didn't expect SmartSleep to restore Safe Sleep's usefulness, but it did.
Instead of just switching off Safe Sleep, I decided to use the mode that gave the software its name, "Smart Sleep." In this mode, the laptop will only use Safe Sleep if the battery charge is below a configurable threshold; as long as the charge is above the threshold, the laptop will sleep normally, i.e., without saving its RAM contents to a file on disk.
Quite to my surprise, Safe Sleep has worked flawlessly ever since I set SmartSleep to Smart Sleep: although I've forced the laptop to fully shut down by using it well beyond the "battery low" warning dialog several times, it has reliably started up from hibernation every time as soon as I plugged the power brick back in and hit the power button.
To double-check that this was actually the result of using the SmartSleep preferences panel, I restored OS X's default settings -- sleep and always hibernate --, and what do you know: the MacBook "reliably" shuts down without writing the RAM to disk, requiring a cold-boot the next time I start it up, just like it did before installing SmartSleep.
I'm not sure how SmartSleep works its magic -- it might have something to do with the note "hibernates only when battery charge is below 5% or less than 5 minutes" as seen in the screenshot above -- , but there is no doubt that it has turned Safe Sleep into a very reliable and, thus, useful feature again.
SmartSleep is free, and you can download it from Patrick Stein's Jinx website.
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Mac
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