SmartSleep Preference Pane

A while back, Erik blogged about the Unsafe Sleep setting for Macs, allowing for ultra-quick sleep and wake up. The only two problems: 1) it takes a little terminal magic to set new defaults for your machine and 2) you can't change the battery when the machine is only asleep (thus, "unsafe" sleep).

Now that's changed with the SmartSleep preference pane. It allows you to set all the possible settings plus a new one. From the preference pane itself:

• smart sleep: sleep if battery charge is above the sleep & hibernate level. Hibernates only when battery charge is below 5% or less than 5 minutes.
• sleep: machine will go to sleep only (saves state in RAM only, battery keeps RAM contents)
• sleep & hibernate: machine sleeps and hibernates. (default)
• hibernate only machine will go to hibernate only. (saves state on disk, battery will not be used)

The first one is new: it dynamically allows the machine to do "unsafe sleep" until the battery gets low, then switch to "sleep + hibernate", allowing changing the battery while the machine is asleep. Very nice: best of both worlds.