PowerBook G4 Takes Forever to Sleep

[iThinkergoiMac]

I've got a 1.5 GHz 15" PowerBook G4 with 2 GB RAM. Despite its age, this machine is quite good and, though slowly, does everything I need it to do. Within the past week or so, it's suddenly decided to take a very long time to go to sleep... about a minute or so. It does not matter whether or not I simply close the lid or give it the sleep command from the Apple Menu. Before this happened it took the computer about 1 second or so to get to sleep mode.

I have tried restarting the computer several time and ran all the cleaning/maintenance options through OnyX and nothing helps. I've done a Google search and found nothing, nor was I able to find anything on this forum either.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[GGJstudios]

Warm milk and a bedtime story?

If it's only a minute or so, why worry?

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

If only it were that easy

You make a good point. However, I use this laptop on the go a lot, and having to wait around while it sleeps is rather annoying. At this point, it's actually faster to shut it down. It does wake from sleep almost instantly, it's just the going to sleep part.

I should also mention that this used to be a 1.25 GHz PBG4. When one of the RAM slots died, I replaced the logic board with one from a 1.5 GHz PBG4. It worked fine for sleeping for months afterwards, though, so I can't imagine it's related.

 

[nsbio]

Anyone have any ideas?

Check what processes are running. I have exactly the same machine and I had exactly the problem you describe. In my case it was the new version of the WeatherBug application (the previous, beta version worked fine). Once I killed it, the problem went away.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Hmmm... I hadn't thought of that. Any clue how to find the culprit, if there is one? My CPU graph in the menubar (iStat Menus) doesn't show any abnormal usage, nor can I find a process using an abnormal amount in the Activity Monitor...

 

[nsbio]

Hmmm... I hadn't thought of that. Any clue how to find the culprit, if there is one? My CPU graph in the menubar (iStat Menus) doesn't show any abnormal usage, nor can I find a process using an abnormal amount in the Activity Monitor...

The process in my case did not show abnormal activity either. It is just by killing one thing at a time...

Maybe you could try to login as a different user and see if this clears the problem? If it does, then it is definitely a software glitch in your current user profile.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Great idea. I'll try that and get back to you.

Don't know why I didn't think of that yet...

 

[rdowns]

Do you have sufficient free space on your hard drive?

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

I'm thinking 128 GB of free space is probably enough I've upgraded the internal drive from 80 GB to 250 GB as well. No problem with free space.

I tried another user (after logging out of mine, no fast user switching) and the same thing happened. Even when no users are logged in... same thing. Another thing I noticed is that the sleep light is really dim at first, and then eventually gets up to full brightness.

I'm thinking, therefore, that it's not a process that's holding up the sleep process. I don't know what it is, I'm hoping it's not something hardware related.

EDIT/UPDATE: So I just did a disk check and my startup disk needs repairing, apparently. OnyX finds something wrong, but Disk Utility doesn't. Most odd...