Hard drive in PB can't go to sleep...

[Yuh]

Just got my new powerbook and I've got a question:
When the comp is idling, ie nothing open except Finder, the hard drive likes to write something small (maybe 75KB or so) to the hard drive every so often (maybe every minute or two) and this stops the hard drive from going to sleep... or sometimes it does manage to go to sleep, only to eventually wake up within a minute or so to write something again.

So i've opened up activity monitor and got the following processes running (under my user):
WindowServer
ATSServer
loginwindow
TabletDriver (for the wacom tablet which isn't plugged in at the time)
pbs
Dock
SystemUIServer
Finder
AppleSpell
Activity monitor

And i'm running Panther upgrade with all patches. Anyone know what could be the culprit? And how to stop it?

 

[JFreak]

do you have bluetooth devices? have you allowed bluetooth to wake computer up? it is very easy to keep computer awake with bluetooth devices.

if it's the tablet driver, you can kill it with terminal. at least give it a try if bluetooth wasn't the reason. (open terminal, type "top" and write down the "pid" of the wacom process. then press "q" to quit top and then type "kill -9 PID" where you replade that pid with the number you wrote down.)

 

[Yuh]

Nope, bluetooth is off. Okay, i'll try killing the wacom driver.

 

[Yuh]

Okay, killed the wacom driver... and killed the AppleSpell as well, since that isn't normally on when i just boot up. hard disk writes are still occurring though. I'm using airport to a wireless router with WPA encryption.... i'll try turning airport off as well.

 

[Yuh]

Ok I've tried it turning off airport (only way to access the internet from the PB) and left the wacom driver on, and that solved the problem of the disk accesses. So i'm guessing the culprit is something that needs access to the net. Don't know what it is just yet though.

On a totally unrelated question though, when i open and quit the application "Internet Connect" to check the signal strength, it leaves behind a "tail" process as seen in Activity monitor. And if i do that multiple times, there are multiple "tail" processes left behind. Anyone else have that problem?

 

[JFreak]

strange. i would have understood the once-in-a-minute disk activity when the system is running, because that would just be the mail.app checking email. but that should go to sleep, too.

do you have some 3rd party hacks installed?

 

[Yuh]

No 3rd party hacks installed.
Well it's definitely something trying to access the net... i get a spike in disk activity at the same time as network activity.
Just wondering if you could confirm if you have the same thing happen when you open the internet connect application?

 

[cb911]

to see if it is a process trying to connect to the internet that's giving your problems you could try a neat little app called Little Snitch. it'll alery you whenever an app tried to connect to the net, so you shoudl be able to see whatever app is causing the network activity.

sorry i don't have a link for it, but it shouldn't be too hard to find. there's a demo version you can download to try it out.

 

[JFreak]

no spikes here. it gets interesting

create a new user to your system and login to the freshly created account. try to put it sleep there. any luck? if this works, there's something in your account that you don't want there. you will just have to find out what.

one more thing... do you have modem set up to connect to internet whenever possible? or allowed computer to wake up for admin access or modem ring?

strange things happen to your computer. mine goes to sleep nicely and stays asleep until i wake it up.

 

[Yuh]

Hmm is there any program that can log or monitor what files a program accesses?