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HelloNateR · 07:57 AM

I posted this over on Apple's discussions, but I thought I'd try here as well. Something is keeping my display from going to sleep. I have Energy Saver preferences set to let the display sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. Recently, I've noticed that as soon as the display goes dark, it immediately comes back on all by itself. Any ideas what could be causing this?

Here are a few things I've done and the results...

I changed Energy Saver prefs to sleep the display after 1 minute instead of 10 minutes. The behaviour remains--the screen goes dark after 1 minute, but then immediately will come back on again.

I restarted my computer. I let the computer start up, and I never touch a thing. The display sleeps as it ought to.

I launched Bittorrent, then let the display sleep. It sleeps just fine.

I launched Entourage, then let the display sleep. It sleeps just fine.

I launched Safari and let the display sleep. It sleeps just fine.

I figure..."Ok...the restart must have solved it." I then do some web browsing over at ilounge.com to research some FM transmitter solutions for my iPod, and then call it a night and go to bed.

This morning, the problem is back again.

Any ideas?

I'm running a 17" 1.67 GHz latest rev PowerBook G4 with 2GB RAM and all the latest OS updates, etc., installed.

kick52 · Nov 7, 2006, 07:40 AM

open up activity monitor see if anything is suspicous (such as proccesses constantly using CPU power)

Big Mac · Nov 7, 2006, 07:43 AM

Have you tried resetting the PMU?

kick52 · 07:56 AM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

Have you tried resetting the PMU?

hmm.. worth a try.. the PMU is the device that controls power and such....

i dont know if it would fix it though.. as it seems that some software triggers the non-sleepiness...

might wanna try reseting the PRAM aswell, but reseting 'da PMU does that for y'all.

HelloNateR · Nov 7, 2006, 08:21 AM

Activity monitor doesn't show anything unusual, as far as I can tell.

I've just performed the PMU reset, so we'll see if that helps. The problem is that it seems to be fine after a restart.

I thought it might have something to do with enabling ARD/VNC on the machine, which I've done recently, but then that wouldn't explain why restarting seems to fix the problem temporarily.

(Off topic: Strange things have been happening with my PB recently. This weekend, all of the sudden I couldn't view any Flash content in Safari. Firefox worked great, but not Safari. I was reinstalling Flash plugins, uninstalling, reinstalling, pulling hair out, etc., only to find out eventually that the "Enable Plugins" box in Safari preferences somehow got unticked! I know I didn't do that!! Oh, well. I hope nothing bad is befalling my beloved PB!!)

cagljevic · Nov 7, 2006, 05:42 PM

Although not the exact same situation, i think i can add something to your situation.

I have a last generation powerbook, using the apple bluetooth keyboard and a logitech v270 bluetooth mouse. both are a wonderful pair to my powerbook. the only issue i have wtih this setup is that the logitech for some reason continues to wake the computer from sleep. i dont know why, but i suspect when ever the powerbook goes into sleep mode, the logitech mouse panics and searches for a connection again, this forces the powerbook out of sleep. long story short, it may not be a software configuration that is keeping your display from dimming, but rather a peripheral that you may have connected to your computer. just a thought...

HelloNateR · Nov 8, 2006, 03:34 PM

Well, I did the PMU reset, and the problem has not happened again. So far so good.

HelloNateR · Nov 10, 2006, 01:59 PM

Well, everything was fine again for awhile. Today, the problem came back. The screen will wake itself up immediately after going dark.

I'm not sure what it could be. I restarted and the problem went away again. I guess my next step is to keep track of everything I do until the problem comes up again. Anyone else have any ideas?