hibernate, suspend, is it safe to unplug mains power when battery in?
 

Dell Inspiron 2000. Suspend it with Fn+suspend, or by closing the lid. Is it safe to uplug it from the mains when it's in this mode? The battery is in and it works all right if I do this, but am worried I might be buggering something.

Thanks any help.

Yes, it is safe. Laptops don't seem to mind.

Recently I was giving a (long) lecture at work, with some "slides" on Openoffice. My laptop was plugged in, but I forgot to turn it on at the mains.

50 minutes in, the battery went flat, and the laptop suddenly turned off. I had missed the warnings it was giving, and no one in the audience felt they could / should interrupt me.

I turned it on at the mains. Pressed the ON button, and instead of the boot process and fsck complaints I was expecting, I was straight back to my slides. I was momentarily stunned, as I didn't think linux was that smart yet, and carried on.

Sony Vaio (from last year) and kubuntu 6.06.1. Love it.

Yes, you can move it while it's suspended. Although, IMO, you should use hibernate.

Great thanks tredegar and hacker supreme.

Errr....what's hibernate and why's it better? Assume we're not talking 'Relational Persistence for Java and .NET'.

on my laptop suspend means to save data in ram if the batteries goes 0 % all the data would erased
hibernate saves the current state to the harddisk so that next time you switch on it recovers the saved state
at least on mine it s like that lol

That's huge evildarknight. This is probably cretinous but it occurs that the thing shouldn't be moved when the hd is spinning.

People use laptops on planes, in trains, in the back of taxis. They don't mind being moved, they hate being dropped!

yes but when you save to ram the harddisk does spin down
the data is preserve in ram using minimal battery power so it is safe to move it during suspend

Thanks tredegar and evildarknight. I was assuming the hd must keep spinning during 'hibernate'.

Any road up I tried installing hibernate but it seemed to want a shed load of stuff so sod it.