'Snow Leopard' Insomnia on Late 2007 MacBook
Hi Charles,
I've been a fan of your "Ramblings" for years now, having found much
helpful information in them about a variety of Mac problems. I can't be
the only late 2007
MacBook owner who has this problem, can I? I've Googled and read
lots of forums, but there doesn't seem to be much talk about this. I
have Wake for network access disabled, no USB devices plugged
in, Bluetooth is off, and yet still the Mac randomly wakes. Sleep
worked fine before Mac OS X
10.6 "Snow Leopard". 10.6.1 update didn't fix it.
I am suspicious of Little
Snitch and iStat
Menus, but there doesn't appear to be anything in the console logs.
Sometimes the Mac sleeps for a few hours, rarely all night. Surely,
someone else has this problem and knows what to do about it?
Mike
Hi Mike,
That must be frustrating. I haven't heard from anyone
else on that or seen anything on the forums that I recall.
It might be a conflict with some other third-party
software.
Something to try as a diagnostic would be to create a
new, fresh user account and run in that for a while to see if the
behaviour manifests. If it still does, it may be a bug in Snow Leopard
itself - possibly unique to affecting your particular MacBook
model.
Charles
My G3 iMac Died
From Frank:
Hello Mr. Moore,
I emailed you a while back about deleting applications, and your
advice helped, thank you.
I just wanted to say congratulations on the broadband and to update
you on my Macs. Well my iMac G3,
600 MHz, 40 GB, 256 MB RAM, OS X 10.4.11 has died. It started
to randomly shut down and got to a point where it would come on for
minutes at a time. So I had to store it away and use one of my Indigo iMac G3s as a replacement.
Recently, as of yesterday, I was given a Power Mac G4 (Digital
Audio), which is my first G4, and I have to say I see a huge
difference from the G3. I can now watch MP4 encoded with H.264 without
the stuttering. I can't wait to get it online and see how it works with
Flash video.
I got the Power Mac G4 with OS 9 installed, and when I did the
firmware
update (4.2.8), the G4 wouldn't recognize the Apple branded
keyboard. OS 9 wouldn't recognize the keyboard, so I just erased
and installed OS X
Panther. It's a shame, because I wanted to keep OS 9 in
Classic. The iBook
Dual-USB, which I'm sending you this email with, is chugging along
and is the most used Mac that I have. Well I have no real questions
right now, and I just wanted to update you on my Macs.
Thanks,
Frank B.
Navajo Reservation
Hi Frank,
Thanks for the greeting and update. I'm delighted to
hear that you're still getting a lot of useful service from those old
Macs. The G4 is quite a contrast with a G3 in some respects, especially
with AltiVec optimized software.
Not sure what's up with the firmware update and
keyboard. Not a problem I've encountered.
Charles
The Practical Approach
From Denny:
Hi Mr. Moore -
I like the approach you take in your columns, where the idea is to
keep your laptop as long as it works for you. It is very practical.
I've kind of been following them for years, partly because you had a
700 MHz iBook and I
have a 900 MHz model
that I was pretty much getting done what I needed to.
However, as technology progressed, I was thinking at some point it
would be right to change. So when you bought a Unibody MacBook, I started
eyeing the MacBook line. Long story short, I picked up a 2 GHz
model for $750 when it became available at the Apple refurb
store. (Thanks to you, I also learned to stay away from the Intel
video chip models.)
I'm really glad I got it, too (even though my iBook still works
fine). The interesting thing is that it has changed my computing
habits, so that, for example, in addition to my regular work on it, I
also mess around more with video and music. And I've been able to add
more power-hungry apps that I couldn't use before, and the Web is
faster now.
I followed your example and made do with what I had, but when the
time came to upgrade, I went for the best deal (the Unibody would have
been nice, but I went for lowest $). I'm happy with it.
So I made the technology leap, and I'm glad. Keep up the good
work.
Denny
Hi Denny,
Thanks for the feedback, and I'm delighted that my
musings have been helpful to you.
I haven't regretted upgrading to the Unibody MacBook
either. It's a peach of a computer - on track to be my favorite I've
owned so far.
Upgrading the RAM to 4 GB proved to be icing on the
proverbial cake.
Charles
The End of Flash 9 Support on the Web
From James:
Charles,
Glad to hear you successfully connected to broadband service. In a
way, I'll miss your rants about dial-up. They were a good
progress-marker for how efficiently Mac web technologies were
working.
Speaking of efficiently using old technology, I have an observation
that may affect some of your readers.
I reassigned my G4
mini to the living room last winter. We canceled cable and began
using the mini as a media hub, thanks in large part to Hulu and a half dozen other sites. The G4
handled video decently using Flash 9. Firefox 3 was the browser of choice and
delivered more frames per second than Safari 3, Camino, Opera, or any of the others I tried.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was
far more efficient at delivering video. I'm using past-tense, because
all this somehow changed.
Sometime over the last month, Hulu, YouTube, and other Flash intensive sites
stopped working well with Flash 9 on the Mac. They now only deliver
extremely choppy video. I've done complete reinstalls of the OS,
programs, drivers, etc., and no improvement. The only recourse has been
to upgrade to Flash 10 but the G4/Tiger combination isn't great for
this.
I'm now using the G4 mini with Leopard, Flash 10, and either Hulu
Desktop, Safari 4, or Stainless. With reduced video
quality settings and more RAM, it's a useable alternative. Now that you
have broadband, you might consider it too. At the very least, you
should revisit web-radio services through iTunes. This could be the
subject of a few new articles.
Best wishes,
James
Also from James:
Hi Charles,
Last winter, I decided Hulu and a half dozen other sites had caught
up enough to cancel cable. We did some shuffling of the house machines
and ended up with a G4 Mini in the living room as a general media
center. Flash 9 through Firefox 3 on Tiger delivered very acceptable
results for Hulu and YouTube when allowed to buffer a little.
This summer I tried out Hulu desktop, which has steeper CPU and RAM
requirements. Great interface. It runs very well on my Intel Mini but stutters on the G4
Mini even in low resolutions mode. "Good thing to remember when we
upgrade," I thought and returned to using Firefox. Unfortunately, Flash
9 has never worked properly again on the G4.
After many attempts to uninstall Flash, switch browsers, reinstall
the OS (including downgrading to Panther and upgrading to
Leopard), I began to suspect support for Flash 9 had been dropped. This
was easy to verify, because we have two other G4 machines in the house,
both PowerBooks. I tested all three with various versions of the Flash
9 plug and different browsers using Hulu and YouTube as references. All
three had been used daily for watching video up until midsummer without
problem. Given the results across the board, it now seems obvious that
Web support for Flash 9 has been dropped. I can only guess it was a low
priority compared with the need for more efficient video compression
and higher quality video streaming for those services.
This leaves us with perfectly good G4 machines that can't stream
video, an extravagance at one time that has become a primary function
of computers for myself and others.
After more testing, I settled on the G4 running Flash 10 through
Stainless on Leopard. I can't say enough nice things about Stainless
but even this isn't enough to over come the limitations of the CPU.
Leopard runs Flash 10, but ironically has much poorer video performance
on the G4. Some say this could be improved a little with more RAM, but
the G4 Mini has dedicated video RAM, so I'm skeptical. Of course, the
paltry 512 MB of RAM I have in there is laughable, but then again, the
resale value of the whole machine has plummeted over the last couple of
months so as to make any more investment unwise.
Given my recent experience over the winter with the Lenovo s10, I
think I'll be rotating my Intel Mini to serve as our entertainment
center and buying another s10 as a modular solution for the studio. The
Intel Mini should have a longer life with 2 GB of RAM, USB 2 for large
fast external hard drives, faster system throughout, and Apple Remote -
much better package than the deliberately crippled Apple TV.
No real question here, although suggestions are welcome. I think we
all know the answer. I just can't believe I'm in a position to say that
a G4 Mac isn't good enough to do what I need to do.
Thanks,
James
Hi James,
Thanks for the congrats and reports/commentary.
I haven't yet been able to more than scratch the
surface of what's now available to me via broadband. Time constraints
as usual the inhibitor. I'll gradually acclimatize. :-)
Flash was largely terra incognita for me
throughout my long tenure as a dialup captive - I pretty much avoided
video (often still images too), which was just too excruciatingly slow
at 26,400 bps. A whole new world, now, at least on the Intel Mac.
I'm pleasantly gratified at how well my old Pismo does on broadband, but
Internet speed was formerly my biggest bottleneck that compressed the
performance gap between the old 550 MHz G4 and the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo.
Released from that constraint, the performance contrast is
highlighted.
Internet video is still pretty bad on the Pismo - the
RAGE Mobility 128 GPU with 8 MB of VRAM likely more of a handicap
than the G4 CPU and modest 640 MB or RAM, but that rig, much as I love
it, would simply no longer be remotely adequate as a primary production
machine, although it still is very acceptable for the stuff I do with
it and gets three or four hours use most days.
Charles
Benefits of Webmail
From Alan Zisman in response to Do You Trust Your Email to the
Cloud?:
Charles,
While I appreciate the arguments for desktop-based email clients,
I've moved entirely to webmail over the past few years (I forget when
exactly I made the switchover).
I'm also a Gmail user. For a long time, I used Eudora, mostly on
Windows - when I moved to the Mac, I found I didn't care for the way
Mac-Eudora handled HTML-formatted messages (the Windows Eudora used
Microsoft's IE engine behind the scenes, which offered more
browser-like display than what you got in Mac-Eudora), so I moved my
mail to Apple Mail, using it for several years and several OS X
versions.
But I work on multiple computers - computers at home, at work, and
when traveling, Macs, WIndows systems, more and more Ubuntu systems,
etc.
And by using Gmail exclusively - and the web interface exclusively -
all my mail is always available. I like the way contacts are integrated
into it, though I don't like how the Gmail contacts get cluttered with
seemingly everyone who has emailed me or received mail from me. I
exported what had been my Mac Address Book into Gmail without too much
problem (there is always clean up required after this sort of export,
I've found). And using Google Calendar completes the set.
While I'm aware of the potential dangers of storing all this stuff
on a remote (and US-based) server, I also suspect Google does better
backup than most individual users. I had one iBook that went through
three hard drive crashes, and it took me most of that time to learn to
keep my backups up to date.
Of course, relying on webmail and other cloud services assumes
broadband and always available Internet access, something that has been
pretty true for me for quite a while. If I were in a rural community
requiring dial-up, it wouldn't work at all!
The point, of course, is that no single size fits everyone - for me,
Webmail & the cloud lets me access what I need on any computer
running any operating system wherever I happen to be. And that trumps
keyboard shortcuts and the rest.
Alan's website
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the comments.
Yes, HTML rendering was pretty awful with Classic
Eudora on the Mac. I'm a plain text kinda' guy, so that never troubled
me overmuch, but good HTML support in Eudora 8 is no hardship.
I'm still adjusting to the Internet being available
all the time without having to dial up.
As you say, "different strokes..." The hybrid system
works for me.
I guess I've been fortunate, but in 17 years of using
Macs, I've never had a hard drive die in any of my computers, but I do
back up regularly.
I may get into using more of the Google Web apps as I
acclimatize to broadband.
Gmail, is great, for all the reasons you mention.
Charles
Webmail vs. Desktop Email
From Dan Knight:
Charles,
A few more items you could have included in your email piece.
With desktop email, you don't have to wait while Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft, or whoever scans an attachment for malware that can't do
anything to your Mac.
With desktop email, you can access mail in several different
accounts at the same time. With webmail, you need to run a separate
browser for each Gmail account you want access to at the same time.
(Another benefit of so many good Mac browsers!)
Gmail offers the best of both worlds with Web, POP3, and IMAP
support for free. I use several Gmail accounts with POP3 access. (I
tried to like IMAP, but synchronizing files between desktop and cloud
can be a slow process. Back to POP3 for me.)
For my use, the question boils down to this: Is there any benefit to
having these messages on my Mac? If I might want to access them in the
future, want Spotlight to index it, or it includes a download, I prefer
desktop email. For the rest, Yahoo Mail and Gmail suit me just
fine.
Dan Knight
Hi Dan,
We're on the same page I think.
Frankly, I just couldn't get along with just one
browser, even if it were not for the multiple Gmail account issue. I
have a minimum of three browsers running at all times, but it's one
reason why I also maintain Yahoo! and Hotmail Webmail accounts.
Some folks profess to love IMAP, but the attraction
has always eluded me.
Charles
My Webmail Addiction
Hi Charles,
Personally, I have come to rely on ubiquitous access to my email
accounts. The one I'm mailing you from is the one I use the most, but I
also have two Gmail accounts; one is a spam catchall I use for website
memberships, and the other is strictly for family and friends. I have
IMAP enabled on this one and the main Gmail account so that I never
have to worry about synchronising my email clients.
Speaking of, I use Thunderbird on
Windows, Evolution on Linux, Mail.app on Macs, and my BlackBerry's
push-IMAP for mobile access. When all of the above fails (as happened
briefly here in Northwest Georgia during the flooding Monday), I can
get to them from any computer using the web interface. I've found this
is the best solution for me to stay connected, especially during
disaster-relief efforts.
One more thing; welcome to the world of broadband! I just switched
from 3 Mbps DSL to 16 Mbps cable and cut my bill by $30 per month
in the process! The speed difference isn't quite as dramatic as what
you are experiencing (I've been there, too) but it's still a welcome
change.
All the best,
Morgan
Hi Morgan,
Yes, the ubiquity of Webmail is seductive. No bother
with synchronization. Convenient for me since I use three different
'Books on a daily basis.
Since switching to the Core 2 Duo MacBook as my main
production machine, I've been happily surprised by how much I like
Eudora 8.x, which as you probably know is a Thunderbird clone and uses
the T-Bird application folder. Works essentially like T-Bird with
Eudora interface nuances. I'm a convert.
I heard about the floods in your area and saw some
pretty alarming news footage on the TV news. Don't know how widespread
that severe flooding was, but I hope things are drying out. My
sis-in-law lives in Tennessee and probably got the same weather system,
but she's in a mountainous area, so likely didn't get flooded. We
haven't heard anything, anyway.
I'm enjoying the speed!
Charles
Broadband and Power Outages
From Jeff:
Charles,
I live in town and find that generally my broadband (via cable co.)
stays up during outages unless it affects a very large area for
a significant problem. I had a tech tell me that most of their
equipment is either on generators (main office) or industrial UPS
(local hubs). So it takes either a fairly prolonged outage or extremely
widespread one to cause a problem. I have had brief (5-10 min) outages
during some storms. YMMV :-)
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
I hope there is some sort of UPS is in place, but I'm
not optimistic. The tower is way out in the boonies (as am I) and
serves a relatively small customer base, so I expect its a pretty
low-budget installation.
Stands to reason that a cable operation in a
middle-sized city like yours (population 124,009 according to Google)
would maintain backup power. I live in a county measuring roughly 75 x
25 miles with a total population of about 9,000. ;-)
We had a 19 hour power outage here in late 2007.
Charles
Penny a Minute Dial-Up
From Phil:
I have broadband and keep a small dialup account for when it goes
out, or when I bring my iBook to my aunt's and want to check email.
www.budgetdialup.com - 1
penny per minute, $10 lasts all year if you don't use it.
Cheap.
-P
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the tip. Looks like a great emergency
dialup service.
The nearest local access number is an exchange 150
miles from here, so there would be long distance charges attached for
me, but even so probably cheaper than maintaining a backup dial-up
account for the amount I would use it.
Charles
I Also Have Pismo Target Disk Mode Problems
From John:
Charles,
I was just reading the note from
Chris on Low End Mac, in which he relates his experience with
Target Disk Mode (TDM) on a Pismo. I had the same experience when I had
a Pismo. No matter what I tried, pressing the "T" key produced a
shutdown instead of taking the computer into TDM. I was trying to
transfer some files from the Pismo to the 17" PB G4 that replaced it. I
ended up doing a workaround by booting the G4 into TDM and then moving
the files from the Pismo to the G4 on the screen of the Pismo. I never
could figure out why the Pismo wouldn't go into TDM.
John Black
Hi John,
Thanks for the tip.
Charles
Peroxide for Sanitizing Keyboards
From Cath after reading How Concerned Should We Be about
Computers and Phones as Disease Vectors?:
Hi Charles,
Just read your article from last year. My immunity is shot, and I
have to start using a public computer lab soon. I like the idea of
peroxide - I can't do Clorox or alcohol either.
But what mixture do you use? Just straight 3% peroxide or diluted,
and if so, how much?
I really appreciate your help.
Thanks much
Cath
Hi Cath,
I think 3% drugstore hydrogen peroxide would work
fine. There is also peroxide-based laundry bleach that I use for bigger
jobs.
On the keyboard, actually what I use personally is 33%
food grade hydrogen peroxide cut 11:1 with distilled water, which I
think works out to something like three or four percent. I wouldn't use
any dilution milder than that.
It's very important to apply the peroxide with a damp
cloth and make sure none gets down into the circuit boards below the
keys, which could permanently damage the keyboard. Use at your own
risk, of course.
Another disinfectant agent that I sometimes use on
keyboards is colloidal silver, which also has no odor. It's relatively
expensive to buy, but I have a small colloidal silver generator and
make my own. The same caveat applies about making sure not to get any
liquid down into the circuit boards.
Charles
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