Auto-sleep problem

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
For months, I've had problems with OS X's auto-sleep feature. 99% of the time these days, it simply doesn't work. It seems like the problem has had several causes over the months, because at one point I was fairly sure it was iTunes, but that's clearly not the case now.

I've tried narrowing down the cause, but I'm at a loss. It's not iTunes, Activity Monitor, iChat, Safari, Gee, or any other "likely" suspect. The only visible app that's been loaded through all my tests is the Finder. Nothing appears wrong when I look at Activity Monitor, either. The only processes using up time when idling are pmTool and kernel_task, both of which are system processes that, AFAIK, I have no control over.

Any idea how I might fix this? And are their any smart third-party auto-sleep programs out there I could use instead?

Manual sleeping works just fine, but it's not really practical.
 
I ran into this same problem with all 3 of my G4 macs (450, 933 & 1.25MHz iMac iLamp model) several OSX versions ago (probabaly 10.2.x something or other) and never got it back. They all did auto sleep before that.

I have tried removing all USB peripherials but mouse & keyboard, PCI cards, extra RAM, FONTS, making new users, etc. Nothing works. I had removed those sys prefs dealing with sleep hoping newly created ones might correct possilbly corrupt ones. No dice.

All I can think of is that some errant software or driver is making calls to some system function keeping machine awake & prevents auto sleep.

Good luck. Hope you find it & let "REST OF US" know. I gave up & just manual sleep when I want it to.

PS

Bought a PCI USB 2.0 card ( IOGEAR )and that definitely does not like deep sleep with anything connected to it. NUTS. Can't even manual sleep this one with anything connected to it.
 
Another member here, jbarley, PM'd me with his own solution, which works for me. I'd like to share it. (I hope you don't mind, jbarley.)

He made a shell script to re-set the sleep settings, and then compiled that into an AppleScript. Just paste this into Script Editor:
Code: 
do shell script "pmset -a displaysleep 7 disksleep 10 sleep 15 halfdim 0" password "your_password_here" with administrator privileges
Replace "your_password_here" with an admin password. Or you could take out the whole password bit and have it prompt you every time it runs, if you're concerned about the security of putting your password in an AppleScript. I'm not sure exactly what "halfdim" does, but I think it only applies to laptops. All numbers are in minutes, and you can change them to whatever you like.

He said he set it up to run once a day. I don't find that I need to run it that often, although I have needed to run it more than once since I started using it about a week ago. I haven't decided on a method to have it run periodically without requiring my attention. Any ideas on how I should do that? My first instinct was to put it in my login items, but I only restart once or twice a month, so that doesn't really cut it.

Thanks for the link, Randy. I haven't tried that, since this script solved my problem, but it's good to know.
 
Mikuro said:
I haven't decided on a method to have it run periodically without requiring my attention. Any ideas on how I should do that?
Click to expand...
I use CronniX for this. Save your script as an application (it's the easiest way to get things working quickly), and use CronniX to get things get the app scheduled for, say, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 2:00 PM, or something like that. I do this with several scripts that I've written to do various things on my Mac.
 
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