If you put your computer to sleep in one of these modes and find it immediately wakes back up again, fans whirring, login-screen ablazing, open a Command Prompt as Administrator (right click on the Command Prompt icon in the Start Menu>Accessories and select “Run as Administrator”). Then type:

powercfg -lastwake

You’ll likely see something like I did, and see a USB Root Hub caused the start.

type

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

and it’ll give you the names of the devices that actually caused the wake-up signal to fire. For whatever reason, my Keyboard and Mouse both seemed to be culprits so I disabled them both by typing:
powercfg -devicedisablewake “HID-compliant Mouse”
powercfg -devicedisablewake “HID-Compliant Keyboard”

case was sensitive for those names and they matched the output from the “wake_armed” device query above. That did it, allowing my machine to sleep properly. Waking up now has to be done from the power button on the front of the case.

There are some additional tips in this post on vistax64.com which I may experiment with if I get the time, but the current setup is good for now.

I also experienced a lockup on my MacPro using the Computer Name screen saver. I locked the screen, walked away and when I came back, had a black screen with a mouse cursor on it. Couldn’t bring up the login dialog or connect to it through SSH.

Hopefully Apple releases another fix for these and whatever other issues are lurking under the covers tomorrow when they talk about the Snow Leopard release at WWDC.

There are a bunch of reports of Mac OS X 10.5.7 update breaking sleep on a variety of machines ranging from PowerMac G5s to MacBooks. I can personally vouch for having issues with my MacBook Pro and MacPro*.

The recommended fixes range from resetting the SMC on MacBook Pros to pulling all external USB and Firewire devices from the machines. As usual, a number of people are running the Repair Disk Permissions voodoo with little effect other than the feeling of well-being you get from taking a strong, well-documented placebo. Other suggestions include resetting the PRAM and NVRAM.

None of these suggestions have worked for my MacBook Pro. It’s incredibly frustrating and is going to make my laptop essentially useless if I can’t put it to sleep and wake it back up. Note that I get one free sleep by closing the lid. Subsequent attempts to sleep the machine cause it to freeze in a kind of blacked-out state. It seems to be running, but the display stays dark. I’ve heard reports of people being able to put their machines to sleep manually, but I haven’t tried this yet.

Worse, I tried running a system restore from Time Machine with an install disc. When the installer finally loads, the backlight turns off. Using a flashlight(!) to see the contents of the screen, I’m not given an option to select a restore point from my Time Capsule backup. I might be able to do a full install and restore up to my last safe point, but this scares me.

I strongly urge people to avoid 10.5.7 like the swine flu and stick with 10.5.6 until this is fixed.

* the MacPro issue is separate and involves it waking up sporadically from sleep

Update: this Apple Discussion thread describes the problem and a fix. The problem appears to be related to wireless network locations with disabled ethernet ports. Re-enabling the port seems to fix the issue.

Update 2: The fix worked. Re-enabling the Ethernet port seems to have fixed the sleep problem. Weird, but glad to have an answer. Thanks to the intrepid and persistent people in that apple discussion thread. I’ll keep looking for a fix for the issue with my Mac Pro.

Then a funny thing happened. The n3wbs and I started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. This is a series that we’ve played since the first version on the original Xbox. I spent an unhealthy amount of time in a friend’s basement playing Project Gotham 1 in head-to-head racing. We got pretty good at it. We still miss San Francisco which was never included in any of the subsequent games and made for some pretty insane racing. PGR2 was probably the game we played the most as a group. Not Halo. Not Gears of War. Project Gotham 2. We have our own lexicon of terms for racing. Some of the less-colorful ones include, “crop-outing” and “toro”.

I recently made some changes to my room, moving my gear around for better viewing position. So when we started playing PGR4 after a year’s hiatus, I was shocked to discover some strange audio glitches coming out of my speakers. Engine noises had drop-outs. Music would skip. It was the strangest thing. I checked other sound sources at the speakers and listened hard for anomalies. I checked cabling to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up during the reorganization. I tweaked sound settings in the game. I put up with it.

Then I checked the Interwebs. Sure enough, a bit of googling turned up some hits about PGR4 Audio Problems. Weirdly, it’s a result of installing to the hard-drive. Why this should be makes absolutely no sense. It has to be playing the sounds from memory (assuming the engine noises aren’t discretely modeled audio simulations which would be very surprising and worthy of at least several papers) and it has to load them from a disk. It shouldn’t matter where they’re coming from. The only reason I can think of is that using the hard-drive is putting extra load on the processor or I/O buss and that’s causing the glitching. Still sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?

At any rate, I’d like to see MS release a patch for this, but since Bizarre Creations have pretty-much stopped caring about the PGR series (*snif*) that’s very unlikely. I’ll have to suffer and play it from the DVD.