Faster, deeper, sleepier

My first Mac was a G4 Powerbook, and one of the principal “wow” factors was the sleep function - close the lid or hit the power button, and the machine would sleep more-or-less instantaneously. Waking up was just as fast, which was always good for impressing the Windows fanbois as they went off for a coffee or three while their Windows machines restarted.

When I upgraded to a Macbook, I found that the sleep function took a lot longer - not so much longer that it wasn’t still impressive to Windows users, but long enough to be irritating to someone used to a Powerbook. That’s because the Macbooks sleep AND hibernate, which takes a while as the contents of memory are written out to disk.

SmartSleep is a free-as-in-beer utility that installs as a preference pane in System Preferences, and allows you to change the default behaviour of the sleep function so that it just sleeps. This is dramatically quicker - but the clever part is that the utility will switch to sleep and hibernate if the battery level drops below a definable threshold.

All of which will save me, oh, minutes per day….

Filed under Technical stuff |