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Mac G4 Sleep Issue

Starbuck1975

Starbuck1975

Lifer
My wife is running a Mac G4 with OS 10.4.8, and recently started to experience a problem with her computer going to sleep.

If she selects "Sleep" from the "Apple" icon on the menu bar, the computer will not go into "Sleep" mode. However, if she lets her computer sit for some time, it will go to "Sleep" on its own.

While in "Sleep" mode, moving the mouse or tapping the keyboard does not wake up the computer. This forces us to do a cold reboot on the system.

The "Sleep" function was working normally prior to the last day or two.

We have tried numerous troubleshooting paths, but nothing seems to resolve the issue. In terms of peripherals, she has an Apple LCD Cinema Display, the mouse and keyboard that came with her G4 and a Canon iP4300 installed. As all of her peripherals have been installed for some months, not sure that one of them is causing the problem.

 
How much hard drive space is available and which Mac G4. It may be having trouble entering safe sleep if the drive is too full or too heavily fragmented (assuming it's a laptop). Other than that...try creating a new user on the system and having her select sleep from the apple menu while only logged in as the new user. If that works, the quickest fix is to just migrate her docs and stuff from one acct to the other and toast the old one.
 
My wife's is a 1st or 2nd generation PowerMac G4 desktop...I believe it is commonly known as the Mirrored Drive Doors model.

Mirrored Drive Doors Model

From what we can tell, she should have sufficient hard drive space...I am a Windows user, and know that on a PC, sometimes a simple drive defragment solves such problems.

I am assuming that your recommendation is to defragment her drive as well...can you do that with a Mac?

 
The first issue only concerns laptops (safe sleep is an automatic hibernate that newer macs enter upon going to sleep so that you can remove the AC adapter and battery and still resume from your last state). You can defrag a mac, but it requires third party software.

I'd give the new user account idea a try.
 
Tegeril,

Haven't had a chance to try your recommendation as I was away for the holidays. I intend to try the new user account troubleshooting tonight.

In the event that I do create a new user account, and the problem persists, what would be the next troubleshooting step?
 
Ah now that's a tricky question =)

What you're going to want to take a look at is the Console app that resides in your utilities folder. It will have various logs for system and application specific errors and just general output from applications. You may find a specific message stored in one of the relevant logs. I made a PPT for really basic mac troubleshooting for some people during move in at my school, if you go to some of the later slides, there are two screenshots of the Console application to show you what I mean: http://www.dotstrosity.net/WhenItsReallyBroken.ppt

If it has anything you think could remotely be relevant to this problem, it's worth posting here. Now if there's nothing... Then I'd be curious to know if you have a second Mac. If you do, I'll go into that a bit more - a second Mac will help to rule out whether this is a hardware or software problem.
 
I was actually looking around on the Apple tech support website, and found an article that offers this troubleshooting tip:

Reset System Management Controller

Unfortunately, we do not have a second Mac in our household...my wife is a graphic designer, so she is an Apple loyalist...I can usually troubleshoot PC problems, but I am a bit in the dark on the Mac side of the house.

Is resetting the System Management Controller a good idea? The article does mention that following these steps resolves many sleep related issues.
 
Totally worth doing =) I was still looking into this from the software level, but that definitely is something to do.
 
Tegeril,

Oddly enough, the troubleshooting tips on the article I sent you resolved the problem. All I had to do was cut power to the Mac by unplugging its power cord, let it sit for 15 seconds, then reconnect.

After following this quick and easy solution, the Sleep issues went away. I can manually put the Mac to sleep, and it wakes up with a keyboard stroke or movement of the mouse. Similarly, if the Mac goes to sleep after sitting for a while, it now wakes as it should.
 
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