Safe Sleep?

Research:
Silvermac.com (found via MacRumors forum thread)

Macosxhints.com

Safe Sleep tips from Macworld’s Mac 911 blog

Igor Minar’s blog

Andrew Escobar.com

The Intel-powered Apple laptops (and the last G4 PowerBooks) have a feature that Apple calls Safe Sleep. Windows laptop users know this as Hibernation. My iBook would sleep immediately when shut and come awake upon opening. It did not hibernate or Safe Sleep, near as I can tell. I never noticed or cared. It just worked. I could close it and put it in a bag or move it without worry. Since I got a MacBook Pro for doing freelance work, the damn thing restarts if I close the lid and do anything with it. When I would open the lid I would see the login screen. At first I thought this was random. Research and subsequent actions have proved that it is not random in the least. If I move the laptop too soon after closing it, it will restart. If I wait until the LED on the front pulses, I can move it with relative impunity.

The benefits to me of a hibernation mode are meager. While I can swap a battery in this mode, I don’t own two batteries for the machine and since it’s my main machine, I’m never away from it for days at a time. If I was going to be, I’d shut it down. So I’m wondering if it’s worth it to change the settings via Terminal to turn off Safe Sleep? Anybody? Will it improve the time to sleep or should I just nut it up and wait for the pulsing LED magic?

This is what a father researches in the seventeenth hour of Barf Watch 2007.