My new (a month and a half old) Macbook Pro (13", 4GB RAM, 10.5.8) displayed a problem I now know seems mildly common: on waking from sleep, it showed only a black screen and movable cursor. No keyboard inputs worked. Putting it back to sleep and opening again had no apparent effect. I had to reboot to get anywhere. This is the first time in a month and a half of regular put-to-sleeps that this has happened. I have no outside devices attached, wirelessly or otherwise (except Airport Express), and I don’t use Time Machine right now.
Any suggestions on this? I’ve read a lot of threads, and so far there’s a lot of shrugging of shoulders. I assume that someone official is working on this, I hope?
One suggestion I’ve read is resetting the SMC. The page that describes how to do so uses some VERY dire language: do not do this unless nothing else has worked! Well, how do I tell if I’m at that point? What happens if I’m really not?
I reset by holding down the power button. How harmful is this? Is there a better way to do so?
How do I make certain that my computer is really asleep? I’ve seen some folks have problems with this. So far, I’m fairly sure that it has been put to sleep (the computer is always, as far as I can tell, cold when I pick it up after it’s been asleep), but if I have it asleep for several hours while unplugged, and plug it back in, there’s indication that the battery is recharging, something (I’ve read) it’s not supposed to do.
No direct answers from me, but here are a couple of thoughts…
One of the most common sleep issues seems to arise from opening the MBP before it is fully asleep. This would happen if you shut it and then realized you still needed to send off a quick email.
I have done this before and found that unless the Mac is fully asleep (the white light is “breathing”) you might cause it to wake to some very strange state. Prevent this by waiting for the breathing light before reopening.
If you find the delay before full sleep annoying then you can go for a utility like SmartSleep, which tweaks the settings of your Mac so that it doesn’t write out the RAM until the battery reaches a certain point. This makes sleep cycles much faster and, possibly, cleaner.
Had you waited long enough, the login screen would’ve appeared. This used to happen to me occasionally. Upgrade to OS X 10.6 - this is actually listed somewhere on Apple’s site as an improvement in Snow Leopard.
Don’t bother, see 1).
It won’t really harm anything, unless you put the computer to sleep in the middle of some important operation (i.e. installing a new program) and encounter this problem upon waking it up.
The computer is asleep when the power light starts pulsing. It is normal for the battery to drain while in sleep - it continues to provide power to the RAM so that the computer can wake up instantly. If you remove and then reinsert the battery while the computer is sleeping, you will reduce the battery drain (though Li-ion batteries lose charge even while not powering anything). This is called hibernate mode - the power light will be completely dark. When you start up the computer after doing this, you will have to use the power button, but it will still put you back where you left off before going into sleep (the computer also stores the entire RAM state on the hard disk before going to sleep, in case battery power is lost).