New MBP has ROM caching for power failure!

[e-coli]

If anyone here has a new Macbook Pro, I have just found a very nifty feature. I recently went to switch batteries in my MBP, and without thinking, just closed the lid (effectively putting it to sleep), flipped it over, and pulled out the battery. It was not connected to a power source, therefore it immediately shut the system off. I had a good deal of work open and unsaved, so I was pretty worried. However, after putting the new battery back in and powering the machine on, I was treated to a wonderful surprise:

My screen came back up instantly, with all of my work open, and a little progress bar indicating the machine was retrieving my previously opened programs and documents from ROM.

Simply amazing. Could this be a hint that instant boot is coming in Snow Leopard?

Picture attached.

 

[miniConvert]

It's known as Safe Sleep I think. When you shut the lid, RAM stays powered where possible but the contents is also written to the HDD incase there's a lack of power.

Don't think it's new.

 

[mkrishnan]

Erm, isn't that SafeSleep? If so, Apple introduced it in 2007, I think.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9090

 

[hobbbz]

My mom's old white MacBook does this. If you let it die die die like no juice in the battery while sleeping, it will write the contents of memory to disk just before it turns off and then restores everything once it does have power.

PCs don't have a proper sleep mode like Macs but they've been doing this trick for years under the name 'Hibernate'

 

[Shawn Parr]

Safe Sleep was introduced with the last series of G4 Powerbooks. All the intel laptops Apple has made have this. Including the Macbook I'm using that I bought in 2006.

PCs don't have a proper sleep mode like Macs but they've been doing this trick for years under the name 'Hibernate'

Sure they do. It is called Suspend. They have for quite a while too, although for a long time many had driver issues and it didn't always work properly. Although that is also true with Hibernate. Some Windows Laptops were good with hibernate but not suspend, some were good with suspend but not hibernate. Nowadays I think they all tend to work fine.

Case in point, I just configured an Asus EEE 1000h with Ubuntu-eee (linux distribution) and while it took a bit of research I was able to get both Suspend and Hibernate working. It even suspends when the lid is closed, just like you would expect.

 

[hobbbz]

Sure they do. It is called Suspend. They have for quite a while too, although for a long time many had driver issues and it didn't always work properly.

Well that's what I get for staying off PCs since 2003.

 

[mkrishnan]

Well that's what I get for staying off PCs since 2003.

I think that's probably it. Around then, sleep was still fairly unreliable on Win2k and WinXP computers... I had a T42 (I think... some 13" or so Thinkpad) for Work running Win2k from 2002-2004 and it hibernated reliably but its sleep mode was not completely reliable.

I think they finally got it working reliably in the next year or two after that. Windows PCs bought in the past three or four years seem to be pretty good at sleep/wake. My EeeBox has no issues with it on XP/SP3.

 

[Sun Baked]

The Lisa had a similar feature in 1983, took awhile for Apple to bring the modern version of it back.

 

[alphaod]

This is the same as hibernation.