Hello George and Cathy,
I do not believe that in general letting your system go to sleep
hurts it. That said, I will qualify it with the thought "as long as
you have no problems with your machine waking up from sleep to begin
with." By that, I mean if your machine can wake up from sleep and
things are fine, then , nope, no damages should happen.
Unfortunately, some external devices can for various reasons
interfere with the waking up part, and in some cases cause you to
have to power down and re-start the hard way, by pulling the plug and
then plugging things back in again. This is a lot harder on things
than some folks let on, because it can cause hard drive corruption
and failure if it happens repeatedly (no, I cannot tell you how many
times it takes to be considered repeatedly). The system keeps several
files open all of the time and needs to write these back to disk to
shut down properly. Obviously a hard shutdown will interfere with
this process. Even with journaling turned on, eventually there is a
point of too many times.
This is not solely caused by the third party hardware folks. Some
Version 1.5 G5 machines (and late version G4 machines) had troubles
with nap mode (sleep) with the fix being that you downloaded the CHUD
tools from the Apple Developer's web-site so that you could turn nap
mode off.
Lest you start to panic now, I repeat "I do not believe that in
general letting your system go to sleep hurts it. "
But if you are having problems, this can be a place to look.
Jerry
p.s. I do let my system sleep, if that helps.
p.p.s. hit some of the tech sites and do a search for sleep issues.
Cathy, this one might interest you especially:
http://www.macfixit.com/staticpages/index.php?page=20031110094532646
FTA (From The Article)
While there have been a number of reported problems with waking from
sleep after updating to Mac OS X 10.3, the general consensus has
focused on one specific scenario:
Sometimes when sleep is activated, the hard drive will appear to spin
down and the monitor will go dim, but the fans will stay on,
indicating that the processor(s) is still functioning. When the user
attempts to re-awaken his or her system, the monitor will remain dim.
This problem is not consistent, and is not repeatable every time by
most users experiencing it.
One potential clue is that some users experiencing this problem have
been able to successfully put their system to sleep and awaken it
after a restart or a cold start, but only if they haven't performed
any tasks yet. This indicates that some process (possibly a graphics
card initialization?) could trigger the problem.
George Lacy's loss of video with a GeForce card lends credence to
this theory:
"After installing Panther (not a clean install) I lost video on my
GeForce4 MX 440 AGP card. The computer started up fine until time for
the finder to come up and then the screen goes black and presumably
the computer freezes. I was able to get video initially but the
screen redraw was terrible. When I tried to change the resolution the
monitor went black and the computer seemed to freeze - although I
have mouse movement."
.... rest cut out
p.s. I am curious as to why your messages have that [bcc][faked-from]
in the message header...
On Aug 18, 2005, at 8:25 PM, Green, Cathy wrote:
> Likewise here, wondering if the external drive not showing up on
> the desktop problem discussed earlier might have been due to
> putting my machine to sleep nightly....I sleep it during the week &
> shut down on weekends...just curious & anxious to avoid
> deliberately contributing to my own headaches, if at all
> possible...TIA,
>
> Cathy
>
> ----------
> From: owner-macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu on behalf of
> George H.Yankey
> Reply To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 8:24 PM
> To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu
> Subject: Re: MacGroup: energy saver setting? [bcc][faked-from]
>
> Jerry, your statement that "waking from sleep causes big troubles"
> got
> my attention. We seldom turn our EMac off at night but do put it to
> sleep several times each day. Does this damage our system in some way?
> We have enough computer problems at best without deliberately
> creating
> more .
> George Yankey
> On Aug 18, 2005, at 2:59 AM, Jerry Yeager wrote:
>
> > Probably the biggest question to ask an answer to from yourself
> is 'Do
> > you intend to turn it off at night?'
> >
> > This will make the rest of things fall into place, because waking
> from
> > sleep is the biggest source of troubles so far in the Mac OS-X
> world.
> > (Some USB hubs and / or external FireWire drives do not play well
> with
> > being put to sleep --- this is one place where Apple does not have
> > much control over the hardware hooked up to the machine).
> >
> > Once you decide that, then the rest is straight forward (I am
> being a
> > bit lazy at this time o' the day, finding thing out before eyeing
> the
> > list of possible options).
> >
> > Jerry
> >
> >
> > On Aug 17, 2005, at 11:38 PM, Ben Hershberg wrote:
> >
> >> Do you all have any suggestions for energy saver settings on an
> iMac
> >> 2 gigaherz G5? I've heard different ideas about whether it's better
> >> to keep the hard drive running all the time or shut it down, and I
> >> also would value suggestions about the other possible energy saver
> >> settings--automatic computer and display shutdowns, etc. The
> default
> >> settings didn't seem to make much sense. thanks--Ben Zion Hershberg
> >>
> >> ps: the G5 is living up to my high expectations
> >>
> >>
> >> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
> >> | be August 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
> >> | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu>
> >> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
> >>
> >
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
> > --------------------
> > "All else failed, ..., so, ..., so I did it, I read the directions.
> > (silence)
> > "Ewwww, gross.
> > "Yeah, I know.
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
> | be August 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
> | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu>
> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
>
>
-----------------------------------
Someday, I will come up with a clever signature line. I am not sure
if I will use it or not, but I will come up with one.
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