My Mac don't go sleeping since Lion Update

Since there seems to be some confusion in this thread, this reply is for those who are having trouble making their iMac,MacBook Pro, Macbook etc. go to sleep when idle.

I've noticed a number of people on here who have had their problem solved by disabling sharing or flushing their printer queue. I've also noticed others were able to find the problem using the PMSET command. This is good and should be the first steps taken when attempting to remedy this issue.

However, there are a substantial number of you who still have no solution. Moving forward from here, let's try to focus on these people and stop diluting the thread with proclamations of unprinted documents.

Before going forward, let me recap my hardware as well as the symptoms of the issue:

1. Mid 2009 MacBook Pro
2. OSX Lion (This was when the problem started)
3. The display would sleep after the set time in energy preferences
4. The disk would not sleep and the light on the front of the mac would not breathe.

After months of fresh installs, processes of elimination, a little luck, and some serious frustration, my problem was two-fold:

1. Better Touch Tool was one of the programs keeping my mac awake. I've spoken with the developer and this will be solved with an upcoming 0.741 release which is in alpha testing. I am having no problems using that version.

2. The other culprit was Spotlight. It was getting hung up on some personal files I had from an external drive. I don't know what files they were or why they were giving Spotlight a problem...yet. Simply preventing Spotlight from indexing my drives the traditional way was not enough. I had to use terminal to disable Spotlight completely.

The following commands are for OSX Lion:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

To turn it back on:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

One last thing, when testing idle sleep I had put my energy prefs on 1 minute. Even when set to 1 minute, it might take 5-10 minutes for the sleep image to be written to the Hard Disk as well as for the Hard Disk to fall asleep itself. Make sure you give it enough time.

Hope this helps some people!

Hi Ali

For weeks not able to go into sleep mode, had replaced printer 3 years ago. Now removed the old printer working 100%.

Regards Stan

Try resetting the SMC memory of your MacBook next time, this may be causing the problems with devices released in 2010.

hello

same problem here.

all other ways to sleep my macbook pro 15 (late 2011) works, but energy saver didn´t.

pmset -g assertions gives me nothing

and quiting dropbox is not the solution either

the white light of sleeping is all time on when i use the energy saver timer for sleep...

i'm running Lion osx, my mac comes with it.

Pleasesleep aplication works fine, but i want to understant what's going on.

thanks sorry my english.

making some research i found this.

Lion's energy saver preferences are on 1 minute for sleep, and "sleeping hard drives" is check (my osx is in spanish, and i don't know if that is the right translation but you can undesantd my point as well), my terminal pmset -g is:

MacBook-Pro-de-Luis:~ luis$ pmset -g

Active Profiles:

Battery Power -1

AC Power -1*

Currently in use:

standbydelay 4200

standby 0

womp 0

halfdim 1

panicrestart 157680000

gpuswitch 2

hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage

sms 1

networkoversleep 0

disksleep 10

sleep 1

hibernatemode 3

ttyskeepawake 1

displaysleep 1

acwake 0

lidwake 1

i think that "disksleep" is givin 10 minutes to sleep the hard drive, thats why the light of sleeping is all time white.

i'm trying to solve this situacion...

what do you think?

i set my "disksleep" value to "1", the same value that i have in "energy saver" preferences, and no solution, (for that work i use sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

Then, i set in energy saver screen the value to "10 minutes" and magicaly pmset -g assertions, reveal a change in the value:

Battery Power -1

AC Power 2*

Currently in use:

standbydelay 4200

standby 0

womp 1

halfdim 1

panicrestart 157680000

gpuswitch 2

hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage

sms 1

networkoversleep 0

disksleep 10

sleep 10

hibernatemode 3

ttyskeepawake 1

displaysleep 10

acwake 0

lidwake 1

two things appears, the firs is the change of the disksleep value to "10" and the second is the AC Power value to 2* ... i have not idea what it's going on, but now i'm going to let my mac without use for 10 minutes and see what happens...

Clearing the print queue fixed my problem perfectly. So happy to not have to go around killing processes, uninstalling anything, or ripping apart my machine to get to a reed switch like I've read in other thread. Thanks so much!

My new macbook Air 2011, OSX 10.7.2, was also not sleeping/going into proper standby since receiving it three months ago. The symptoms included the battery being completely dead in the morning and the machine powered off, even though energysaver setting was to go into standby at 15 minutes.

I've found that pleasesleep (http://www.dragonone.com/products/macosx/pleasesleep/) fixes the problem. Finally, I can leave the lid open, and in the morning, it's hardly lost any of it's battery time.

Seems to be a common problem that Apple needs to address with a fix to the OS.

apexio wrote:

Internet Sharing is causing this problem too.

Yes, I also discovered this. I'm wondering if this is a bug or not. If it was not a bug and Apple wanted that behaviour, an alert saying “This computer cannot sleep because Internet Sharing is still activated" should be displayed and the sleep cancelled instead of starting the sleep mode but hanging in the middle.

Anyone interested in sharing an opinion about this thought?

This was exactly my problem with my new 15" 2.2 MacBookPro. If plugged in it would not go to sleep (white light stayed lit). When I opened it the screen would illuminate for a couple of seconds and go black. It would not respond to tapping, clicking, space bar, etc. If it was not plugged in then everything was OK. It would go to sleep (i.e. the white light would pulse) and when I opened it the screen would remain illuminated. I checked my printers and found one file in queue for a printer that had been disconnected. Once I deleted that file from the queue my MBP works OK again whether plugged in or not. Thanks. I actually read this and benefited from it while on hold to speak to someone at Apple Support.

Hallelujah! after trying all the above workarounds with limited success, I installed 10.7.3 last night and my iMac slept like a baby 🙂 I've tried to put my mac to sleep seveal times throughout today and it stays asleep! (knock on wood)

I've had the same problem for some time now (a MacBook of 2007 which wouldn't go to sleep). Thanks to this thread I solved the problem, thank you friends! It was a print queue item that was keeping on working in one of the non default and unconnected printers that I've got set up on the MacBook.

Yup, print job stuck in a network printer's queue. Strange thing is, it had slept just fine for a few days after I was no longer in range of the printer. Installed 10.7.3 and no more sleep. Thanks Boz0!

I mean thanks Andyzzz

Mine was simply a job stuck in the print cue. I deleted it and it was fixed.