One thing that was added to the latest (last) revision of PowerBooks just two months after I bought mine was “Safe Sleep” functionality (at least it wasn’t as significant as the first SuperDrive, which happened the last time around). While the Mac has always was first place in the wake-from-sleep speed race over Windows, Windows did have the added bonus of its “Hibernation” feature that writes your computer session to your hard drive before turning off. No power, but your computer state ready to be restarted (albeit slower than the Mac’s traditional “I’ll keep everything but the RAM and VRAM off” Sleep).

Well, for all those Mac people looking to have that feature but thought they were burned by spending their hard-earned cash a little too soon, rejoice! It’s not really a hardware thing (it works for the most part on the revs of the current model lines - not so much on earlier systems), but a software thing. If you haven’t updated to at least 10.4.3, well, you’ll need to do that. But other than that, it’s just a little fiddling in Terminal. I’ve played around with it a little bit, but it doesn’t look like the number of applications has an effect on the wake time as I suggested in my comment to this blog post - before putting my PowerBook to “Safe Sleep” when I left work this evening, I rebooted into my personal account and just launched Mail. And yet my wake time increased to 1:07, so I don’t know what’s going on.

So the cool thing is that you can configure it a little bit. For instance, you can configure it to work as it does on the current PowerBooks, i.e. “Safe Sleep” only kicks in when the battery runs down. Or, if you want to eliminate the convenient timing of “Sleep” in exchange for the power savings of “Safe Sleep”, you can do that.

This last option piqued my interest as one thing that has stuck with me back from my IT days at Bates was that “Sleep” mode didn’t park the heads of the hard drive, which made it a bad idea to move your laptop while it was sleeping (if the heads aren’t parked, they can move - which is entirely possible when physically moving it - and moving heads are a bad thing). To be completely honest, I don’t know if this behavior has changed in years hence. Doing a little bit of Googling, I’ve only come across a reference saying that sleep does park the heads on Macrumors.com - the source being in and of itself begging the validity of the statement. Apple’s support docs don’t help much, as they just cite that the “hard disks spin down”, although Apple’s manuals (PDF) warn you not to move your PowerBook soon after putting it to sleep - which implies the heads do park:

Warning: Wait a few seconds until the sleep light starts pulsating (indicating that the computer is in sleep and the hard disk has stopped spinning) before you move your PowerBook. Moving your computer while the hard disk is spinning can damage the hard drive, causing loss of data or the inability to start up from the hard disk.

Needless to say, I’ll ask at the bar when I go to work at the store on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted. Until then, here’s a little added bonus from the Googlefest: A Dashboard widget that will immediately put your Mac into “Safe Sleep”.