New iMac Shutdown Question

[raf66]

Good morning everyone. I've learned quite a bit from this site in recent weeks as I found it following my purchase of a 20" iMac (2.66 GHz) a month ago. I've got a question for the group and I'm quite certain it's a stupid one so please be gentle.

As I do every night, last night I put my iMac to sleep at around 11:15 pm before going to bed. Upon awaking this morning I couldn't get it to wake up. Hitting keys on the keyboard didn't do it, nor did moving the mouse around. I'm not sure if this is important but both my keyboard and mouse are wireless. Power to the other things on my desk was still on so it wasn't a power problem.

Anyway, I hit the power button on the back to see if it had simply shut itself off and . . . nothing happened. I hit it again . . . still nothing. Finally, hitting it a third time did the trick and the computer roared to life and came on normally. It had never done this before. It had always immediately awakened in the morning upon hitting a button on the keyboard.

First, is this common for an iMac to shut itself down? Second, why would the power button be unresponsive? Finally, if the machine had actually not been off (which I doubt very seriously) did I do a big "no no" by hitting the power button to turn it off/on?

Thanks for your replies.

 

[Frits]

Depending on wether it booted or just woke, it might be your HD was sleeping. If it booted, that obviously wasn't the case. It takes some time for it to wake up, though it shouldn't be more than a couple of seconds at the most. Look for an option to turn that off in energy saving preferences.

It's not common for an iMac to shut down itself. You say it wasn't the power, but I think it could well have been the power actually. The other devices might just have been turned back on again when power returned. Though then I can't explain why you had to push the button three times.

And no, I don't think it could've been bad to turn it on with the power button. If it was on, to turn it down you would have had to press it for around 4 seconds to turn it off, pressing only for a short amount of time just wakes it or turns it on when it's off. And even if you had done the former, that would've been ok, turning it off that way isn't damaging.

Frits

 

[JustGretchen]

I'd check your power preferences in system preferences.

That said, you don't really need to manually sleep your iMac. Set it up in the power saving preferences to turn off the monitor and hard disks after a certain amount of time and sleep after a certain amount of time, that's all you need to do really.

 

[raf66]

Thanks for your replies. Checked it today at lunch and everything was working A-ok. I even put it to sleep manually and woke it up and everything worked fine.

Thanks again for putting my mind at ease.