Can you hibernate a Mac? With the right Widget, you can

Apparently you used to be able to hibernate or "deep sleep" on the old PowerBook G4, but Apple officially stopped supporting that with the newer notebook platforms. In fact, when I look in the Power Saver settings in Mac OS X, I don't even see an option for hibernating or sending the current computer state into RAM prior to shutdown. I routinely utilize Sleep mode on my UMPC but if I know I'm not going to need the device for a few hours or more, I'll occasionally Hibernate save some juice.

With the Midnight Dashboard widget, I'll be able to Hibernate on the MacBook Pro now as well. Midnight allows you put put your notebook into the standard Sleep mode or you can tuck in your Apple for a deeper sleep and save battery power without losing your place.

(via Download Squad)

Comments

[Gordon]

It's my understanding that it does both by default. It takes longer to sleep the newer machines than the old powerbooks because it dumps to disk and then sleeps normally. If you have a charge in your battery and wake it up it disregards the dump to disk and resumes but if the power fails for some reason when you charge and boot it, it uses the dump to disk info to restore the machine.

[Kevin C. Tofel]

Gordon, I believe you're right; essentially the option is not user accessible because the OS handles it for you. This is way to enable some user control.

[Kevin Glattfelder]

Many moons ago (I think OS 9.x) hibernate did make a rather brief showing. I remember using it without any issues. Then one day a system update came out and the party was over. Rumors were that there was some data corruption going on. Fast forward to the present where the machines safe sleep ever time you put it to sleep. An alternative to widget, albeit slightly less elegant, is to close the lid and wait for the sleep light to begin to flash. Once the light is flashing I just pop out the battery for a second.