Continous Restarts

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Level 1

5 points

Continous Restarts

My iMac has a problem. Whenever left unattended for approximately 20-30 minutes it shuts down any open applications and restarts. This happens with Big Sur and with the previous OS. At times I'll come back to find the attached images which indicate the shut down was requested, which it obviously wasn't. The only ways I've found to keep it from happening is to play songs in Apple Music continuously or, if I happen to catch it before it completes the shut down, to open another application.

My computer is the 21.5" 4K iMac with 8G of RAM (Yeah, I know). Does anyone have any idea what's causing this and how to stop it?

Thanks in advance.

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 11.0

Posted on Nov 14, 2020 3:21 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

karina184

Community Specialist

Nov 22, 2020 11:14 AM in response to argo313

Hey there, argo313.

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities! Thanks for posting about the messages you see during periods of inactivity on your Mac. We'd be glad to help you out with that.

What you're likely seeing here is a setting within System Preferences that can be turned either on or off that will automatically log you out of your Mac if there is a specific amount of inactivity. Based on what you mentioned, playing music counts as activity so it doesn't log you out like when no activity is occurring. Check out Set your Mac to log out when not in use for more info on this setting and how to adjust it or turn it off completely.

Take care.

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Answer 2

argo313 Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 22, 2020 2:57 PM in response to karina184

Thank you so much! I wasn't expecting to have to go through the entire Death Star forcefield shut down operation to solve this. Sure enough, it was set to shut down after 25 minutes. Corrected that, so we'll see how it works now.

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