Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Unfortunately my MacBook decided to take the above quote literally! I never used to have sleep issues with my Mac, but somewhere along, it decided to stop sleeping. Maybe it was something I installed or maybe a OS X update. I couldn’t be sure. And a google tells me I’m not alone!
Solving Mac's sleep problem
The symptoms were:
- My MacBook would sleep if I choose the apple ..Sleep menu option
- A lid close would put the MacBook to sleep
- But the MacBook would never go to sleep by itself (it used to)
- The display would shutoff though, but not the notebook itself (no pulsing led , but a steady light)
If your Mac has the above symptoms, read on.
The usual suggestion is to reset the PMU and the PRAM, but that’s like the ‘did you try restarting your xp’ solution from the Windows world! You know it won’t work, but you try it anyway!
Here’s how to troubleshoot this problem and put your baby to sleep!
- Open System Preferences..Accounts..Login Items
- You’ll see a bunch of startup items that’ll run when your Mac starts up
- Look for anything that is related to your USB port (printers, scanners etc)
- For me it was the Canon scanner driver
- Now open Activity Monitor
- For most items you saw in Login Items, you’ll find an entry in your Activity Monitor (not all, but most)
- Find the process and press the Quit Process button
- Go back to System Preferences..Energy Saver..Sleep
- Set the ‘Put the computer to sleep when it is in active for..’ slider to 1 minute
- Walk away for a minute or so!
- Your Mac should be asleep now!
If the above steps worked, unfortunately you’ll have to remove the offending process from your startup item. If it didn’t work, try a different process. Remember, never kill an administrator process. Select ‘My process’ in Activity Monitor to avoid killing an admin process.
If your Mac doesn’t sleep it is mostly likely due to a rogue usb process. Canon and HP drivers are known for this. Remove them and your Mac will sleep again!
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