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Definitive guide to solving the sleep problem on the MacBook

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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!

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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Tags: howto, mac, macbook, pmu, pram, sleep issue, usb