Make Your Mac Sleep Better With Deep Sleep

If you own any new Apple laptop, your machine is equipped with sudden motion sensor technology to detect locomotion. Hence, for instance, should you drop your laptop while it is busy writing or reading data , the sensor will instruct the built-in hard drive’s read & write heads to park themselves in a designated safe spot to alleviate data corruption, loss, or failure in mere milliseconds. This innovation occasionally comes with a price. If you carry your laptops around while it is dozing, there will be times when it wakes up on its own without your knowledge due to perhaps strong vibration or juggling. This constitutes a problem. One, it drains your battery and second, the accumulated heat generated while it’s cocooned inside your bag is not a good thing thermally.

This is where Matthieu Beaumel’s Deep Sleep widget comes to the rescue. This simple widget changes the default sleep mode temporarily on your laptop, from hardware suspend (suspend to ram), where your main memory is kept powered allowing the machine to wake up quickly to software suspend (suspend to disk), also referred to hibernation mode. Essentially on the latter, It dumps the state of your machine and the contents of primary memory into the hard drive and consequently turns your machine off. Hence, you do not have to worry about it waking up en route to your destination. When you wake your machine by pressing the power button, the saved data, called sleepimage, is reinstated to the main memory. It will take your machine approximately 10 seconds to perform a restoration, however, so it is not as fast but the benefit is there. One side note: if you are running Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later, Apple introduced another variation to its default sleep mode called safe sleep. In addition to powering your RAM to maintain its contents, and the state of your machine, this data is also saved into your hard drive at the first stage of sleep operation in case the battery on your machine runs out of e-juice.

Prior to discovering Deep Sleep widget, I have to go into the Terminal and use the pmset command to accomplish the same objective Deep Sleep does. However, it is lucidly a hassle. I have to amend the hibernate mode every time it wakes up. Of course, I could write my own simple script around pmset to curb the inconvenience but with Deep Sleep, one click is all it takes to get the job done. One current minor downside is that Deep Sleep does not return you to the desktop immediately after clicking on it prior to commencing its operation. Hence, when you wake your machine up, you need to press f12 one more time to get rid of the dashboard. Nevertheless, Deep Sleep is a free widget that I suspect many of you will find it useful. So the next time you are scurrying across campus with your laptop because you are late for class, you can rest assured it will still sleep safely and soundly.

Get a better sleep here. Make sure your machine is supported.