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By default, Macbook put into sleep mode when you close lid. Although it wake up very quickly when open lid again, but waste battery power!

I rather wait extra few seconds to startup and save longer battery life, by set it to “hibernate” mode when close lid. Hibernate will save your memory stage into hard disk and shut off computer. It then reload back into RAM and you can continue to work on your files.

There is no GUI to switch to hibernate mode. You have to use some command. But don’t worry, just follow my simple steps:

1. Open Terminal > type “pmset -g | grep hibernate” to determine your current sleep mode. All modes are below, choose the one you want to set.

• 0 – Legacy sleep mode. It will save everything to RAM upon sleeping but does not support “Safe Sleep”. Very fast sleep.
• 1 – Legacy “Safe Sleep”. This is the “Safe Sleep”. Everything your laptop goes into sleep, it will save everything to harddisk. Slow on Sleep and Startup.
• 3 – Default. As described above, when sleeping, contents are saved to RAM. When battery runs out, hibernate occurs.
• 5 – Behaves as 1 but applicable only for modern Mac that uses “Secure virtual memory”.
• 7 – Behaves as 3 but applicable only for modern Mac that uses “Secure virtual memory”.

2. In Terminal > type “vi /Users/Username/.bash_profile” and paste the commands below into it

alias hibernateon=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5″
alias hibernateoff=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0″

3. Execute “source .bash_profile” in Terminal.

4. Now you can type “hibernateon” to hibernate when close lid, or “hibernateoff” whenever you prefer it to go sleep.

My Two Cents

I’m satisfied with hibernate mode. I use company laptop on day time, only use Macbook at night. So it save quite a lot of power consumption by hibernation.

Do you have other method to save power? Please share with me, thanks

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Tags: hibernate, power saving