Mike DePetrillo’s Wake Up Your Mac Faster is the best Mac hint I’ve seen in months. I remember like yesterday, sometime in early 2002, watching Rohit Khare at a conference, popping open his Mac every little while to take a note, then shutting it again. I was still a Windows victim at that point, and I was flabbergasted; that was the single feature that weighed most heavily in my decision to switch. The trouble is, at some point between then and Leopard, that feature kind of went away. It wakes up fast enough, but if your machine is heavily loaded, it takes a long time to go to sleep, because it’s saving everything to disk just in case your battery runs down or something else bad happens. Which is a nice feature if you want it, but I don’t; the pain of very occasionally losing my state is way less than the pain of not being able to wake up my mac for the best part of a minute after I’ve told it to sleep. Party like it’s 2002!
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Mike Hayes (Dec 18 2008, at 01:37)
I came across a similar article from Phil Windley a few days ago - http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/10/fixing_macbook_pro_sleep_problems.shtml
He points out that you can also recover a few gigs of disk space by deleting /var/vm/sleepimage, assuming you switch completely to sleep mode.
Finally, SmartSleep - http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html - is worth a look for managing sleep state. (Found from a comment in Mike's post).
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From: Stuart Dootson (Dec 18 2008, at 02:27)
Slow sleep's actually an Intel Mac thing - my iBook (which had a clean install of Leopard when I upgraded) has always slept and woken quickly (unless I'm running a BitTorrent client, but that's another matter entirely).
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From: razmaspaz (Dec 18 2008, at 08:23)
Fantastic!!!
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From: David Magda (Dec 21 2008, at 11:36)
I was doing some research on encrypted swap files on Macs, and ran across this article:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9115?print_version=1
There's a shell script that checks to see your laptop's battery charge: if it's less than 30% it enables Safe Sleep; once it notices that it's higher than 50% charged it will disable Safe Sleep.
Just put it in your crontab (or perhaps root's, though you could edit it to use sudo).
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