So here I am, working next to my MacBook Pro, which has its pretty lid closed and a glowing white light coming from the latch release. “Yup, saving power,” I think as I work on other things. But then I hear the SuperDrive mechanism going and stop what I’m doing to look at the Mac. The white light’s still glowing, so what’s with the noise from the SuperDrive? This seems to be an issue that’s been happening for a while now; even though the Mac is asleep, the drive will be active. Almost as if it’s looking for a disc during boot up. Having no idea what could be causing this, I simply ignore it but still would like to resolve it.

It may be related to another issue I’ve encountered just recently, too. I’ve noticed that if I let it sleep for over 24 hours, popping open the lid gives me nothing but a black screen. Repeated closing and openings do not wake it up. A power cycle is my only choice to regain contact with my Mac. On a hunch, I have closed Skype 2.x beta to see if it could be the culprit. The few times I’ve done this test, the Mac woke up when I opened the lid after a 24-hour nap. So, maybe Skype is causing the drive activity and the inability to wake after long periods of sleep. We’ll see after some more testing.

That’s one Mac that has sleeping problems, but I also have another one that just refuses to sleep. My wife’s Mac mini just doesn’t want to save us any power. It likes playing the screen saver and really won’t go nighty-night. Yes, I’ve checked the settings and yes it’s set for one hour of inactivity. But still, no tired Mac mini that ever sleeps. In fact, forcing it to sleep from the Apple menu still doesn’t work. It blanks out the screen, shows a white glowing dot on the Mac mini’s front panel, and then - poof! - Up it comes again from the dead. “Look mom, no hands!” It’s on or off for that Mac, I guess.

So there’s my fun little life with my two newest Macs. The PowerBook is a workhorse and still has yet to exhibit any odd behavior. Maybe I should shut up while I’m ahead.

Tags: apple, mac, book, pro, mini, sleep, problem, issue