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Freaky computer woes...

wtf?

Why, God of Bits and Silicon, do you choose finals season to take our computers away from us to the hallowed hall of computer repair?

I just had the freakiest behavior ever from my Powerbook.

[More:]

It just forced itself to go to sleep and nothing I did could get it to wake. Then, I hit the force-quit shortcut (Cmd-Opt-Esc) and held that combo. down for about 2-3 seconds and it awoke. However, it immediately went back to sleep. I did this about 5 or 6 times in a row and on the last time even the force-quit combo. wouldn't work!!! I had to hold down the power key to get the computer to force a shutdown. After rebooting and plugging in, it didn't seem to do this. The people at Apple don't know jack shit about this problem and I can't find any mention of it via the regular places on the web.

Crap.

UPDATE [2005-12-06T15:00:35]: It looks like my problem is a freaking motherboard or logicboard problem... if anyone out there has a PowerBook I could loan or rent for a little while, I'd be greatly appreciative. If anyone knows of a Mac rental service, that would be good to know about.

Quick Note: Here's hoping that resetting the open firmware has solved this... to do this, boot and hold down the Opt-Cmd-O-F keys; then type reset-nvram and hit return and then type reset-all and type return. You're computer will reboot.

UPDATE [2005-12-06T16:44:54]: Well resetting the openfirmware didn't seem to work. I even got in a state where my computer went to sleep and nothing would wake it or reset (not even holding down the power key). I had to remove the battery. I then tried the following which also didn't seem to work: Remove the following files and reboot:

  • /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist
  • /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist

Interestingly enough, the last one seems to remove the clock from the menu bar. I didn't have this hair-trigger-sleep problem after removing the above files until I re-checked the "Show the date and time" checkbox in the "Date & Time" panel of System Preferences. I'll leave it unchecked and report back if that fixes this. I continue to think this is software related. But it could be something loosing a power connection.

UPDATE [2005-12-06T17:51:27]: So, noticing that removing preference files and times seemed to do something, I went on a Google hunt. I looked at all the files that had been recently changed and found one .GlobalPreferences.plist that seemed fishy. Turns out that John Gruber had essentially this problem (but more) back in May of 2004: "What to Do When Your Energy Saver Prefs Panel Won’t Load". He reported screen freezes (which I've seen lately) and states where it was hard to wake the thing from sleep. The problem then (which was probably a pain in the rear to track down) was a custom time setting format. So, I typed the following:

open -a /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property\ List\ Editor.app/
~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

which opens the property list editor for this file. Then I poked around a bit and saw an entry for NSTimeFormatString that was set to %1H:%M:%S (a string). Ah, military time. My computer must be freaking out because I have it in military time. If it fixed it for Gruber, it must work for me, right? We'll see... I may have to do what he did and track it to a specific preference file and a specific preference. Yuck.

UPDATE [2005-12-06T19:48:21]: That didn't work. Looks like I'll have to do the trick of moving all system preferences to another location and then seeing if it happens again, moving half back, etc. to try to pinpoint if a preference is doing this and which one it is. Yuck.

UPDATE [2005-12-07T10:01:30]: Well, after purchasing a membership to Daring Fireball and seeing Gruber's link to a great article about how lame "haxies" are ("John C. Welch: Why I Hate Haxies")... I removed Unsanity's APE (which Airfoil uses to hijack applications without restarting them) and a number of other unused haxies that I had lying around. Haven't had this problem again (yet)... time will tell.

UPDATE [2005-12-07T11:28:58]: That didn't work (although the sleeps are becoming less problematic in that I can wake them). I'm going to restart and log-in in Safe mode and see what happens.

UPDATE [2005-12-07T15:08:41]: OK... I've been running for 3.5 hours with no crashes. If I fail to crash for the rest of the day, I believe that I know it is a software issue with one of my login items. The system.log from the Console application shows one tell-tail symptom: "PowerManagement received emergency overtemp signal- Going to Sleep". So, it seems, one of the login items I have is likely sending this signal to the system on accident. Here are my login items:

  • iCalAlarmScheduler
  • iScrobbler
  • MacallyMouseHelper
  • iPulse
  • MicrosoftMouseHelper
  • LaunchBar
  • Synergy
  • Adium
  • Transport Monitor

I don't suspect LaunchBar as I have been running it this whole time with no effect. I feel that Adium is the culprit as it's been crashing a bit and there are known problems with it affecting sleep as things need to disconnect.

UPDATE [2005-12-07T18:35:03]: Nothing worked. It's likely a logic board/logic unit issue in that it thinks the CPU is overheating. Shit. I'm sending it in a screwed for a while.