Yet more good to come from reading Paul Stamatiou’s blog is this handy little tip to make your MacBook go into standby mode quickly.
If like me you’re an impatient so-and-so, you’ll no doubt be bored of closing the lid on your machine and waiting for the standby light to start flashing. Only then is the HDD all spun down and ready to be lugged around. The reason for this is thus: be default, OS X writes everything from RAM to the HDD in case the batter fails while in standby. This is basically a hybrid standby/hibernation and has its uses. The problem with this is if you’ve got a lot of RAM or are just impatient, it can take a good 20 to 20 seconds for that to happen. Paul’s got a way to stop the OS from writing to the HDD, which then makes the whole thing much quicker. Obviously should your battery then die you’ll lose any unsaved data so be aware of that possibility.
Anyway, to make this magic happen, you’ll need to fire up Terminal and enter the following command line:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
Enter your password and you’re done.
Paul’s got a video of his nice fast standby over here, in case you want to see the goods before jumping in.
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There is an even easier and smarter way to do this. Use the SmartSleep PrefPane. It lets you choose between sleep, sleep & hibernate and hibernate only. Even based on remaining battery level. So you have the best of both worlds.
Highly recommended!
Dennis: Interesting, thanks for the link !
[...] The method worked, but wasn’t the most elegant of solutions. Reader ‘der Dennis’ wrote in the comments about a PrefPane alternative called SmartSleep so I tootled off to the appropriate web site for a [...]
Alternatively, if you know you’re probably putting your MacBook down for a while (I know, unlikely
and you don’t want the battery to drain then this may be useful:
http://www.markwheadon.com/blog/2009/01/hibernate-macbook/
Cheers,
Mark