I tried to make the Mac hibernate based on this article, Make my Macbook Pro Hibernate. Unfortunately it did not work and I am wondering if it is because this article is older and maybe it does not work for Mac OS X Leopard.
In the end I have gotten used to not having hibernate on the Mac since start up and shutdown are so fast.
Surely the whole thing about Mac laptops is that they ‘hibernate’ (deep sleep) automatically only when they really need to
That’s true. But when the Mac is in a “deep sleep” it is still consuming power while when a PC is in hibernate it is not consuming power. This is why I end up shutting down my Mac every night.
I was under the impression there are two sleep modes (same as in other PCs) – sleep-to-ram and sleep-to-disk. When you shut the lid it auto-sleeps-to-ram by default, and if it runs low on power (as sleep-to-ram does draw power to refresh the ram banks) it will auto-wake long enough to sleep-to-disk.
I’ve seen mine do that.
http://guides.macrumors.com/Your_Mac_and_Sleep_Mode
The only reason I could see to want to change it is if you want it to not use any power overnight but resume, so that you can use it on battery at 100% in the morning resumed.
If that’s the case, you want the deep sleep widget, but yeah – not supported…