SmartSleep 1.2

Almost a year and a half ago, I listed out a bunch of Mac applications that would be useful for some newly converted friends of mine. This is sorely in need of an update, but until then I’ll just occasionally post what others have to say. Macworld just covered SmartSleep, which can be great for people with laptops:

Patrick Stein’s Smart Sleep, a System Preferences panel, lets you choose between four different sleep modes:

  • Sleep and hibernate: Default mode.
  • Sleep only: No RAM written to disk.
  • Hibernate only: Power fully off.
  • Smart sleep: A special mode whereby your machine will generally just sleep, but will sleep and hibernate when the battery is below a certain power level you specify via a slider. If the battery is below five percent charge, then it will only hibernate.

After Apple made hibernation the default mode when closing a laptop, people are supposed to wait (up to a minute!) for it to finally go to sleep. This tool can be great for doing what really should be built in. It has to be the number one complaint I’ve heard from friends getting MacBook Pros.

(Via Macworld.)

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