First of all, I can’t complain too much because this is a school-provided laptop. If it dies entirely, they’ll just give me a new one. Even so, my little problem is definitely not helping my productivity at school or at home.

Here’s the story:

I upgraded to OS 10.5 at the beginning of the school year (along with everyone else at ISB) and over the last few months I have been experiencing some annoying sleep-related problems. It seems that at least 50% of the time when my MacBook goes to sleep it somehow wakes itself up (I can see the Apple icon light up on the closed lid if I’m near the laptop). Once it’s woken itself up during sleep (without opening the lid) it can’t seem to go back to sleep.

So when I come back to the computer ready to do some work, it doesn’t wake up. I just end up with a black screen and a non-pulsating, bright, sleep light. I am then forced to hold down the power button until the MacBook shuts off, and then restart. I know this is not good for my shiny white friend, but I can’t seem to get it to wake up no matter what I do.

Previously I had experienced a similar problem that seemed to have something to do with the power connection. If I put the MacBook to sleep and either unplug or plug in the power before it’s “officially” asleep (the pulsating white light), it won’t wake up from sleep unless I replicate the power status of the computer before I closed the lid. Now I just make sure to remember to unplug before I close the lid, or wait until the sleep light starts pulsing. An inconvenience, but one I can definitely live with.

This new problem seems entirely unrelated to the power issue and it’s gotten increasingly more common very rapidly. I’ve checked on various forums, gotten lots of excellent advice from my Twitter pals (see below), repaired disk permissions, tried resetting the SMC and changing sleep and display preferences, but it just keeps getting worse.

I’ve started ensuring that I shut off my airport before I put the MacBook to sleep, have disabled Bluetooth and don’t have an devices connected to the computer (aside from the power). I’m even starting to try to remember quit out of Twhirl and Skype before I put the computer to sleep, just in case they can somehow wake it up.

On Thursday alone I had to do a hard reboot 5 times in just one 12 hour period. One of our wonderful technicians tried to fix it on Friday, but it’s still been a problem all weekend. I read a little bit about the possibility that “safe sleep” may cause this problem, and that can be disabled in Terminal but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not.

Either way, now I don’t really want to put the computer to sleep at all (not that I need any more excuses to be online)…

Anyone have any advice?

Light #2 by blakie
Untitled by thejbird