10.5 sleep problem

The obvious solution is to not put your Mac to sleep. I'm serious, there have long been debates on whether or not to sleep a mac or keep them running all the time with no definitive consensus. If you leave the Mac on all the time at the very least it will run cron scripts when it's supposed to. You can set it to just put the monitor to sleep, and if the problem still happens it tells you it's the monitor, video card or drivers.

If Richard's solution on the video driver extension doesn't work try booting from the Leopard Install DVD and running Disk Repair, then Repair Permissions and restart.

You can also download Cocktail or Onyx (I think they are now Leopard compatible but make sure of that before using) and run their various repair programs, such as deleting cache, running cron scripts and rebuilding launch services database.

I'm sorry, but in this time of global warming I really don't think that's acceptable any more. It used to be a valid approach, but why have the computer going all the time when you're not using it? A typical desktop computer uses around 200W or so while it's running (obviously this varies from system to system), and this represents a total waste of energy and needless emissions. We all need to do our bit - every gramme of CO2 put up into the atmosphere is eating away at the finite amount that we can afford to emit before we see irreversible climate change, so we must all avoid emissions at every opportunity.

Nick Collingridge wrote:
I'm sorry, but in this time of global warming I really don't think that's acceptable any more. It used to be a valid approach, but why have the computer going all the time when you're not using it? A typical desktop computer uses around 200W or so while it's running (obviously this varies from system to system), and this represents a total waste of energy and needless emissions. We all need to do our bit - every gramme of CO2 put up into the atmosphere is eating away at the finite amount that we can afford to emit before we see irreversible climate change, so we must all avoid emissions at every opportunity.

While I would prefer to have sleep work correctly on a Macintosh (as it has for the past several years), the case for this translating into emission reductions varies with location and circumstances.

Apple are now meeting the latest Energy Star 4 levels, which means very low power when sleeping (and a high efficiency power supply at all levels of output), even on a nominally desktop system like an iMac. However if your local power is unreliable (as mine is) you will have it connected to a highly inefficient UPS that will always be drawing many multiples of the Mac's sleep power drain anyhow. Emission reduction due to good Apple engineering, absolutely none.

The power supplies where I live are all from coal fired power stations. The rotating reserve (which takes between 8 and 40 hours for shutdown and startup) is such that the coal is being burnt whether anyone leaves a Mac switched on overnight or not. Sleeping my Mac saves on my power bill, and makes me feel better, but it does not in any way reduce emissions.

Deciding just to leave a computer running can be a valid solution, even for someone committed to reducing emissions.

I don't know about your UPS, but my measurements of the ones I have here (mainly APC models of various capacities) show absolutely negligible drain (certainly less than 1W) to keep the batteries toped up and monitor the voltage when not delivering power.

As far as the efficiency levels are concerned (and the EnergyStar 4 standards) - whilst high efficiency is a good thing in terms of there being a low percentage of energy wasted, as far as emissions are concerned this is just not relevant. The only thing that is important is the overall power that is being consumed. If this is, say, 200W, then that is the energy that will result in emissions being created.

The fact that (at 80% efficiency) only 40W of that is totally wasted in heat or whatever is not greatly significant, except to your pocket (or in terms of a slightly increased load on your AC during summer if you have such benighted things). It is obviously much better to have 0W than 200W, which is achieved by switching the system off.

Sleep mode is another matter - it's obviously a definite improvement, but the whole point of my post was to say that leaving the system running, NOT in idle mode, is unacceptable in this day and age.

As far as your other argument goes, of course there are many ways to counter that, but the key one is that if everyone reduces their energy consumption, as many knowledgeable, conscientious and intelligent people are, the overall demand for energy from the grid will drop. This will affect the amount of generating capacity that is scheduled by the electricity provider. If you don't want to do your bit towards this, then don't, but anyone with a conscience nowadays should feel very guilty if they aren't participating.

Given the above (and the argument could be developed much farther but it would bore everyone to tears) I just don't see how you can justify saying that leaving a computer running is a viable solution if you really are committed to reducing emissions.

I know a lot of people will not want to hear the above, but someone has to say it. The situation really is very serious and if we don't get our act in gear and do something the world is not going to be a pretty place to be in the future.

Just wondering if it was possible for soemone to zip up the relevant Tiger Drivers and get them hosted online somewhere for all us who've lost their Tiger Disks!

Sublimeoo wrote:
Just wondering if it was possible for soemone to zip up the relevant Tiger Drivers and get them hosted online somewhere for all us who've lost their Tiger Disks!

Yeah that would be great - I bought leopard for my parents' G4 800 iMac which was on Panther before. It works very well - certainly no slower than Panther, but the inability to use sleep is kind of annoying them! If someone could provide the relevant drivers and really simple step by step for me to follow, that would be really appreciated! Also, does the disabling of quartz extreme have any effect in day to day usage. I'm not at my parents' computer now so I can't even remember if its graphics card supports quartz extreme anyway?

Hey, this worked! Well done. Now my iMac can sleep and wake up again. Immediate problems I noticed have to do with some screen savers not loading. I'll expect others, but they're likely less of a hassle than the no-wake-from-sleep problem.

Not sure if it's legal to do this. Once I did a similar thing and got a friendly notice from Apple. Though if you tell me where to send them I think I can do that.

Yeah I understand. However, if helpful drivers and instructions were to arrive at this email address fixmyimac@yahoo.com I'd be massively grateful. Plus my parents would be able to put their imac to sleep again!
By the way, does the quartz-extreme disabling make any difference in use of the imac?

OK - I followed the instructions exactly on a G4 800MHz 15" iMac and the display is now almost unreadable - like grey dithered graphics. You CAN just about read it so I hope be able to get it back to before I tried this, by copying back my backed up files to the Extensions folder.
For interest, I get a system message that reads
System extension cannot be used
The system extension "/System/Library/Extensions/NVDAResman.kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product's vendor for an update.

If anyone who has done this work-around knows how to fix this so that I can get the iMac to sleep then that would be great. Otherwise looks like it's back to shutting down.

Hmm well I thought I might have messed up given my less-than-expert command of the terminal, but I've double checked what I did and I still can't get it to work - the system error message I mentioned above was in fact a series of messages, listing some of the replacement files from Tiger, and saying that each one was not properly installed. I copied back the Leopard files, did the ownership terminal commands and restarted and the display is back to normal, ie in colour rather than grey dithered graphics. However, the "System extension cannot be used" error messages are still popping up on the screen, in this order:

"/System/Library/Extensions/NVDAResman.kext"
"/System/Library/Extensions/NVDANV10Hal.kext"
"/System/Library/Extensions/GeForce.kext"

I'd like to know if I've missed something obvious in trying to get this to work!

Well that's unfortunate. The only thing I can think of is that the permissions and user/group might not have been set appropriately, or else maybe the extension cache needs to be deleted (to be rebuilt upon restart). I forget exactly how to do the latter, but you might find instructions elsewhere. For what it's worth I did my file copying via the terminal rather than the Finder, and I verified/corrected ownership immediately, then restarted.

Well yeah it's all about permissions and owners - the good news is that I have managed to get it back to its original state, and have learned some more unix along the way, so I will have another go tomorrow.

Among the things I found were that the unix commands on this thread didn't change the owner and group of the files to root wheel - instead the owner was stuck as my user name no matter what I did. Using a knowledge base article ( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106290) I enabled the "root" user and then actually logged in as root to make these changes. Then another thing was that the Tiger files I'd copied had drwxrwxr-x@ as their permissions (by doing ls -l in terminal). All the other files in the System/Library/Extensions folder all had drwxrwxr-x (no "@"). I haven't been able to find out what the "@" at the end means, as Google filters it out, but I couldn't get rid of it either. Then on rebooting I'd get a kernel panic, which I think you are right about deleting the extension cache to fix (as on this page http://kb.ciprico.com/lore/article.php?id=194). Anyway, with all those going wrong, I started the iMac in target disk mode and used my Powerbook to copy the Leopard files back. Then rebooted the iMac (no kernel panic) and logged on as root; then changed the owner/permissions (the @ sign disappeared - phew). So I'm back to square 1! I realise this isn't the place for a course in unix/terminal for beginners, but if there were clear instructions about things such as logging in as root and so on, I might have got here a bit quicker! Anyway, armed with my new-found dangerous (and very piecemeal) knowledge, I'll have another go tomorrow and see if I can beat this thing, and get the trusty old imac to sleep again...
If there are more efficient ways of doing this all directly from the terminal (without logging in as root and so on, I'd be really grateful for any help!)

I'm glad you got a useable system back. If this is any help, I'll tell you in more detail what (I think) I did when I copied the files over.

I opened a terminal window as an admin user, then did a " su" to change to the super (root) user. This requires root user access. At the terminal prompt, I " cd"ed to the /System/Library/Extensions directory. I then created a new directory in which I moved the original Leopard extensions so they wouldn't be overwritten: "*mkdir Leopard_Extensions*", followed by "*mv <name of extension> Leopard_Extensions*" for each. Since I had the old Tiger extensions on a flash drive, I copied them into the Extensions directory by "*cp /Volumes/<name of flash drive>/<name of extension> .*" for each. (That's a space and a period at the end, very important). I then had all the files in the right place. As I recall, the files' user and group were already correct (root:wheel). If not, you would then do a "*chown root:wheel <name of file>*" for each. Permissions are set by "*chmod 755 <name of file>*" for each. (That's rwx for owner, and r-x for group and others, yielding "drwxr-xr-x" when you do a "*ls -l*."

Then " exit" enough times to close the terminal window, then reboot.

OK I'm working through (and know that most of this is basic unix file management - my lack of knowledge of this is what is making an easy problem take me a while to fix).
The latest thing is that the cp command now fails:
I do
*cp /Volumes/<name of flash drive>/<name of extension> .*
I get
*cp: /Volumes/<name of flash drive>/<name of extension> is a directory (not copied)*

More Google-based research on unix commands should get me there....