The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 10 out of 10]

• Developer: Matthieu Beaumel
• Price: Free (Open Source)

[This is the Pick of the Week for the week of October 9th]

We've run a few hints here about Apple's Safe Sleep mode, available on all portable Macs since the fall of 2005 (and certain older machines, as explained in this hint).

By default, all new portable Macs use Safe Sleep mode. Most of the time, you won't ever notice it -- if the machine doesn't lose all power while sleeping, it will awaken like usual. But if it does happen to run out of power, when you reconnect it to a power source, it will wake somewhat slower than usual, and with a different onscreen display. That's because it's not actually waking up; it was powered off, since it lost all power. But what you're seeing is Safe Sleep at work, restoring your machine's RAM state from the hard drive, which it wrote out the last time you put the machine to sleep.

Some people, though, prefer to use this "deep sleep" mode, wherein the laptop isn't using any power at all, all the time. To do that, you have to use Terminal to change the hibernatemode value -- not exactly user friendly. Enter the Safe Sleep widget. Install the widget as you would any other, then just activate Dashboard, launch the Safe Sleep widget, and click on it to send your machine into deep sleep mode.

If you decide to use this program, please read the included documentation on how to recover if something goes wrong (though that's not too likely; I've had no issues with the widget).

I don't use the deep sleep mode all that often, so the widget is perfect for me. Most of the time, I just close the lid and put my MacBook into normal sleep mode. But when I want to conserve battery life -- or even more usefully, swap out a dying battery for a new one on a long flight -- I can now do so via F12 and a mouse click.