Many moons ago (I think OS 9.x) hibernate did make a rather brief showing. I remember using it without any issues. Then one day a system update came out and the party was over. Rumors were that there was some data corruption going on. Fast forward to the present where the machines safe sleep ever time you put it to sleep. An alternative to widget, albeit slightly less elegant, is to close the lid and wait for the sleep light to begin to flash. Once the light is flashing I just pop out the battery for a second.

Gordon, I believe you’re right; essentially the option is not user accessible because the OS handles it for you. This is way to enable some user control.

It’s my understanding that it does both by default. It takes longer to sleep the newer machines than the old powerbooks because it dumps to disk and then sleeps normally. If you have a charge in your battery and wake it up it disregards the dump to disk and resumes but if the power fails for some reason when you charge and boot it, it uses the dump to disk info to restore the machine.