Why does my iMac keep freezing when I get it to sleep?

Question

Why does my iMac keep freezing when I get it to sleep?

I've installed SL and have several problems, but the one major one is that, whenever I put the machine to sleep, it freezes leaving a black screen relieved only by that blasted spinning beachball.

Does anyone know what I can do about this?

Richard

PS: To avoid confusion, I have what I thought was a G5 but it's actually an Intel-based machine after all

MacBook Pro, iMac G5, iPod video 160GB, 3G iPhone 8GB, Mac OS X (10.5), Also run horrible Windows XP using lovely Parallels

Posted on Aug 30, 2009 11:33 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Aug 30, 2009 12:28 PM in response to Richard-Putney

A small addition to this question: it also happens when I leave the machine for a bit, in other words not only when I deliberately get it to sleep but when it does so of its own accord.

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 2, 2009 9:51 PM in response to Richard-Putney

I have the same problem with SL. When I put it to sleep or when it automatically goes to sleep I get the spinning wheel and have to power down and restart,

Reply

Answer 3

Sep 3, 2009 1:41 AM in response to webber999

I've discovered that (so far, anyway) Sleep seems to work OK as long as I've closed my Firefox or Safari windows before putting it to sleep

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 6, 2009 5:15 PM in response to Richard-Putney

Two calls to support and a visit to the Genius Bar couldn't solve this. Then I finally figured out what was going wrong.

For some reason the Snow Leopard install changed my screensaver settings to show/point to photos in iPhoto. Then when my system tried to go to screensaver mode the whole system was freezing up (black screen with spinning wheel) when it tried to access iPhoto's photos. My guess is that since iPhoto is such a memory hog and normally can take a while to load that something wacky was going on with the screensaver trying to access it.

The minute I changed my screensaver settings to something else other than iPhoto I stopped having the freezing problem.

Reply