[Andrew Stephens]

I'm having a very persistent sleep problem with a 17in MacBook Pro.

On start up the machine will always sleep properly at the first request, however after this when asked to sleep it does any of the following:
Not sleep at all
Delay sleeping for around 30/40 seconds

If (when) it then sleeps the screen dims but the sleep light takes an age to start pulsing.
Generally the machine will then not wake from sleep and requires a restart. Sometimnes however it will eventually awake after several prods on the keyboard.

Initially I purged a load of system prefs but the symptoms persisted. So I did a back up and reinstalled 10.4 from my DVD. Since this did not change (and because I was also having issues with the windows partition I went more drastic.

I have installed a brand new Seagate 120Mb drive and done a clean, first time install of 10.5.

I also did a clean install of Windows XP on the new 32Gb windows partition.

Sadly the exact same behaviour persists, so it MUST be hardware? right?

Perhaps resetting the PMU (if this is possible on intel macbooks).

Any advice really appreciated.

Update

Reset PMU, wiped drive and reinstalled Tiger. Same problem. It's got to be a hardware fault yes?

[seanc]

How much RAM do you have? The reason it may be taking so long to sleep is because safe sleep is possibly writing 4gb worth of the contents of your RAM to the HDD.

My iBooks were instant at going to sleep but the MacBook takes a while, I think it's because of safe sleep.

[Andrew Stephens]

it's got 2GB of RAM.

It used to sleep almost instantly.

It's not just the slow sleeping it's the fact that it can ignore the sleep command completely. Sometimes it can by over 2 minutes between pressing sleep and it actually sleeping.

[seanc]

If you were to boot it and leave it with nothing running for a few hours and then try to sleep it, would that work?

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by seanc 

If you were to boot it and leave it with nothing running for a few hours and then try to sleep it, would that work?

I haven't tried that exact scenario but it doesn't sound like a working solution. This afternoon it managed to display several symptoms. If left alone for half an hour or so it went to sleep but then wouldn't wake up.