Macbook Pro must be exhausted from lack of sleep

April 20, 2008 11:20 AM

How to make my Macbook Pro sleep?

I am have a ~6 month old Macbook Pro that I use constantly. I'm very afraid of it wearing out before I finish my grad school program in a year. That being the case, I would really like my hard disk to go to sleep when I walk away for more than 10 minutes, especially when running on battery power. Currently I have the display set to sleep after 1 minute, the computer to sleep after 3 minutes, and the disk to sleep after 5. The reason I have it set so low is because it doesn't work. I can leave my computer unplugged and idle for an hour, but when I come back it responds instantly (none of that disk noise it should make when it's restoring itself to it's pre-sleep state). Furthermore, I have it set to ask for a password when I wakes from sleep, but it never asks after these long periods of time when I should've been asleep.

There are a number of programs I have constantly running in the background, and I assume one of these is constantly writing to the hard drive so that it can't be inactive for the necessary amount of time. The non-system background programs include:
* Quicksilver
* Missing Sync (Monitor, Crash Reporter, and Listener)
* Google Updater
* Google Notifier
* Slim Battery Monitor
* Spanning Sync
I also recently intalled Little Snitch as well as a second monitor, but this was an issue before either of those.

Also I am usually constantly connected to my school's server through OpenAFS and Kerberos Agent.

So how do I figure out what is preventing my computer from sleeping, and make it stop??

posted by jk252b to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

First of all, it's pretty unlikely that your computer will "wear out" in a year. And you did buy AppleCare, right?

As per your question, I would guess it's network activity (either from your connection to the school server or possibly the Google apps) that's keeping your MBP awake.

Here are a couple of articles to help you.

It will go to sleep if you close the lid, right?
posted by maniactown at 12:01 PM on April 20, 2008

I'm having s similar problem with my MacBook. This seems to be a pretty pervasive issue. One of the recommendations that I've seen suggested but have not yet tried is to reset the PMU. There are other possible fixes in addition to this one offered on this thread. Hopefully one of them will help.
posted by inconsequentialist at 1:47 PM on April 20, 2008

Couple of guesses:
Energy saver - unchceck wake for ethernet access
Spanning Sync, reduce to a daily check
Bluetooth - check under advanced that you don't have bluetooth set to wake it.
Test your network by turning it off...and seeing if it'll go to sleep
posted by filmgeek at 2:05 PM on April 20, 2008

@ inconsequentialist - I've also got the problem identified. If I plug in/unplug the power cord, remove/place my iphone in the cradle or plug in/unplug my firewire drive while my 6 month old macbook pro is asleep, you can hear it wake up. You then open the display, and it's black. Hitting keys you can tell it's there - just the display is still asleep. Needs a hard reboot to get it back.

I can avoid it by remembering to unplug everything before putting it to sleep, but it's bloody annoying that I have to remember to open the screen before plugging in the power cord.

I'm pretty sure this happened before 10.5.2, which is what a lot of people said was the point it started for them. I'm sure it started at 10.5.1 for me.

Anyway, I tried all the 'fixes', PMU reset included, and no joy for me. Waiting on an Apple fix at this stage. Sooner the better with any luck.
posted by StuMiller at 2:48 AM on April 21, 2008