This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 16:16 and is filed under Analysis & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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Friday, November 3, 2006
So here I am, working next to my MacBook Pro which has its pretty lid closed and a glowing white light coming from the latch release. “Yup, saving power,” I think as I work on other things. But then I hear the SuperDrive mechanism going and stop what I’m doing to look at the Mac. The white light’s still glowing so what’s with the noise from the SuperDrive? This seems to be an issue that’s been happening for a while now that even though the Mac is a sleep, the drive will be active. Almost as if it’s looking for a disc during boot up. Having no idea what could be causing this, I simply ignore it but still, would like to resolve it.
It may be related to another issue I’ve encountered just recently, too. I’ve noticed that if I let it sleep for over 24 hours, popping open the lid gives me nothing but a black screen. Repeated closing and openings do not wake it up. A power cycle is my only choice to regain contact with my Mac. On a hunch, I have closed Skype 2.x beta to see if it could be the culprit. The few times I’ve done this test, the Mac woke up when I open the lid after a 24 hour nap. So, maybe Skype is causing the drive activity and the inability to wake after long periods of sleep. We’ll see after some more testing.
That’s one Mac that has sleeping problems but I also have another one that just refuses to sleep. My wife’s Mac mini just doesn’t want to save us any power. It likes playing the screen saver and really won’t go nightie-night. Yes, I’ve checked the settings and yes it’s set for 1 hour of inactivity. But still, no tired Mac mini that ever sleeps. In fact, forcing it to sleep from the Apple menu still doesn’t work. It blanks out the screen, shows a white glowing dot on the Mac minis front panel and then — poof! — up it comes again from the dead. “Look mom, no hands!” It’s on or off for that Mac, I guess.
So there’s my fun little life with my two newest Macs. The PowerBook is a work horse and still has yet to exhibit any odd behaviour. Maybe I should shut up while I’m ahead.
November 4th, 2006 at 17:42
I don’t know what is going on with your powerbook (sorry, MACbook) but I have a problem similar to the problem you have with your Mini. My 5 year old eMac will sporadically stay up all night and day. Most of the time it auto-sleeps, sometimes it inappropriately wakes from auto-sleep, and somtimes it inappropriately wakes from manual sleep. Other than running the latest iteration of Mac OS Tiger, it has no obvious commonalities with your Mini. I conclude that either there is a problem with sleep in Mac OS Tiger (unlikely given that Macs have been able to sleep appropriately for years) or there is a problem with one of the hundreds of applications I have installed (and trashed) over the years and I will never figure it out (likely).
November 5th, 2006 at 11:56
I can’t comment on the Powerbook either as that seems like a weird one but the Mac Mini should be fixable. I haved intermittent problems throughout the years with Sleep. None recently but have nonetheless.
The two most common issues are something that installed itself in your Login Items and starts automatically running in the background or something that is just stuck on in the background.
For the first go to your accounts and check the Startup at Login Items to see if something needs to to be removed from the list and then restart the computer. The other thing is to go to the Activity Monitor which is found in your Utilities Folder. Be sure to use the drop down box for All Processes. It shows just My Processes by default and see if something is has your processor pegged when you’re not doing anything. If something has your processor continually pegged at 90% or more even though you’re not doing anything I’d say it’s something funky and you can just click Quit Process. I actually had to do this one fairly recently. Personally I’d still restart the computer afterward unless you know what the errant process is and know it’s not needed.
November 5th, 2006 at 12:08
Oh, and if neither of those get you anywhere my next step would probably be to download the latest system Combo updater. Be sure it’s the Combo one. This seems to fix things that may have not updated properly in the incremental install. I’d run Repair Permissions before installing. I’ve seen some debate on this but the final consensus seems to be to still do it and it can’t hurt.
November 7th, 2006 at 10:13
The combo update and removing the AirClick from the Apple monitors USB port did the trick on the Mac mini!
November 7th, 2006 at 16:46
Ahhh, it’s so nice to be able to Sleep isn’t it? Congratulations on the fix.