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Swap out some laptop's batteries via hibernation mode
Authored by: Anonymous on Dec 13, '06 09:01:45AM

Now I'm going to tell you something that will really flip your lid! When engaged in SafeSleep, if the battery and AC is removed and the backup battery drains, the computer's NVRAM will reset, and it will "forget" that it's in SafeSleep mode and just reboot (instead of restoring), with the clock reset to 1904.

Based on my experiments, this means:

1) When swapping drained batteries, don't take longer than, say, an hour to do it. Okay, kind of obvious.
2) If your battery is drained, and no alternative is available, (another battery or AC), just leave the drained battery in the computer, don't remove it. The drained battery, though too low to run the computer, does provide enough power to keep the NVRAM. This is pretty obvious too.
3) If your battery has been drained for several hours, your backup battery might be low too; in this case, it's safer to plug into AC before removing the drained battery, "overlapping" power sources. Ah hah, not so obvious! This happened to me once and caught me by surprise. I removed my drained battery that had put the computer to sleep about four hours prior, and when I put in the new battery, it just rebooted, indicating that the backup battery was drained too. I repeated the experiment, draining the battery, waiting, and then overlapping to AC power, and it woke from SafeSleep fine.

Rather complicated, huh? I guess that's what we get for wanted to understand every detail about this automatic feature. Okay, all this is getting a bit obsessive on my part. I just really like to espouse the benefits of sleep, because I see so many people not using it on their laptops. Rebooting is so 20th century! ;)



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