If you followed my prior hint on automatically ejecting volumes on sleep (@ macosxhints), I’ve just discovered that SleepWatcher adds about 30 seconds to the time taken to sleep. This has been a big frustration to me over the last month or so, and now I know why.

I’m removing the utility – I’d rather shorter sleep times than automatic volume ejection. What a shame, though.

Incidentally, while we’re talking sleep, recent Macs also save the contents of RAM onto disk when they sleep. For the purposes of comparison, my 2 Ghz Macbook Pro with 2 Gb of RAM takes about 18 seconds to sleep. There are a variety of ways to alter sleep behaviour, but the easiest is the SmartSleep utility, a preference pane that handles it for you.

My favourite feature is its namesake, smart sleep, which will only do a hibernate if the battery is below a pre-set level (default 20%) – that means fast sleep until it’s a good idea to actually backup the session to more long term storage, when the battery is about to fail. Voila, simultaneous cake have-age and eat-age.