My Mac OS X Setup
Installing Mac OS X on a Mac is a breeze, yet I usually do two things after the installation to improve stability.
Hibernation/Safe Sleep
The newer Macs come with a feature called “Hibernation” or Safe Sleep. Every Mac owner knows that you can put your Mac to sleep and wake it any time you want. In contrast to some (almost?) all other major operating systems this just works. The sleep mode still powers the RAM, so you still need some power. Now imagine you put your MacBook (Pro) to sleep and you run out of battery. This is where Hibernation comes to play.
Hibernation writes the contents of your RAM to a file on disk, an in case of total power loss, it restores the contents of your memory from that file → nothing is lost.
Unfortunately writing several gigabytes to disk takes some time, and I experienced hard crashes when I interrupt this process, for example by opening the Laptop shortly after I’ve closed it.
My solution – giving up the fallback option – is to disable Hibernation at all:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0The pmset utility offers some more options (Hibernation only on battery etc…).
Wake on Bluetooth
The default setting for Bluetooth and Power Management is to allow Bluetooth devices to wake the computer. For example you can press a button of your Bluetooth Keyboard or Mouse to activate your computer.
In my opinion this feature isn’t that hot on a Laptop. I once put my Mac into my bag and accidently pushed a button of my Keyboard. The computer came to live, but had no chance at all to cool itself → it ran pretty hot when I took it out of my bag… .
Since this accident I always disable “Wake on Bluetooth” because I wake my Mac by opening the lid, not by pressing some button.
These two options increased the stability of my machine quite significantly, and I don’t miss them in any way, although “Hibernation” would be nice – just in case… .
—
Boom. —Steve Jobs
