Swap out some laptops' batteries via hibernation mode

Dec 06, '06 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: mark hunte

This maybe well known and well used already, but not to me, so I suspect to others also. There have been some hints here on putting your Mac into Safe Sleep mode. But this hint is about using Safe Sleep (and its hibernation mode) to swap out the battery in your laptop.

I recently bought a second battery for my PowerBook, and kept running into the situation of having to swap out, but without having a power source to plug into. I did not trust the idea of the supposed five-minute residue, wherein things were supposed to stay in the Mac when you power down for a battery swap. And more importantly, I did not want to shut down all my work.

So I realised if I ran my Safe Sleep toggle script to enter hibernation mode directly, I could then put the Mac to sleep and swap out the battery. After power up, I'd be exactly where I left off, with all my windows and work as they were at the start. The script is here is an old one I wrote a while back, but there are others (some in the referenced hints above) that also get the job done.

[robg adds: This is probably obvious to most, but now it's documented here. Also, you do not have to enter full hibernation mode to swap out batteries. I actually wrote about this for Macworld a while back, and created a video (embedded Flash version in the above link, or watch it in QuickTime) showing that you can remove the battery even while the machine is in normal sleep mode. That's because Safe Sleep writes the contents of RAM to the hard drive when you enter normal sleep mode; once the indicator light starts its normal "blink-blink I'm sleeping" activity, you can safely remove all power sources. I've demonstrated this several times in public, and never had an issue with it.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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