Sleep

I'm not quite sure when this happened, but my MacBook Pro developed the very annoying habit of not sleeping.

For as long as I can remember, the MacOS had an Energy Saver control panel that, after some period of time, would put the computer to sleep. This is one of the things about the MacOS that I took for granted; after 30 minutes, the computer would turn off the monitor, spin down the disks, and go to sleep.

With the introduction of Intel Macs, the sleep function still worked, though bit slowly. Intel hardware wasn't quite as sleep-friendly as the PowerPC hardware was. Instead of sleeping immediately, the OS writes the contents of memory to disk, then sleeps. This tends to slow things down somewhat, but it does work.

Or it did.

I don't know if it was the 10.5.2, or one of the many firmware updates, but the computer won't sleep on its own anymore. If I choose "Sleep" from the Apple menu, it does sleep, but it won't sleep automatically. Very, very annoying.

The only thing that got the MacBook sleeping again was to turn off the "safe mode" of sleeping (pmset -a hibernatemode 0), but this isn't a great solution. Apple's support forums have many people complaining about this, but no solutions.

I want to get rid of my computer's insomnia, dammit!