MacBook won't sleep--is Parallels responsible?

This is so far unconfirmed, but it seems like after running Parallels I can't get my MacBook to go to sleep, either by closing the lid or by selecting it from the menu. Has anyone else seen this?

Chris

 

Yes. Several times on my macbook (original 2 GHz). 10.4.9 and 3188. But sometimes I can run parallels, shut down cleanly, and the Mac will still go to sleep normally.

When it gets in in its sleepless state, the Mac may also refuse to shut down. It gets to the stage of having a dark grey screen with the usual startup/shutdown rotating wheel of straight lines (not the coloured beachball), and stays in that state until I press and hold the power button to force shutdown. It must be very nearly fully shut down, because there is no message about improper shutdown when I restart.

I am beginning to suspect some kind of interaction between Parallels and Microsoft Office, especially Entourage email. After I've had both of them running at the same time, the chance of problems seems much higher.

 

You've described my situation exactly. I forgot to mention that when it's in that state it also won't shut down. It just spins the progress wheel as you said until I press and hold the power button.

I do run Office. But I don't use Entourage at all. So perhaps we can eliminate that as a possible cause.

I wonder if it indicates something wrong with one of the Parallels' kernel extensions.

Chris

 

We had this issue from time to time on an Attorney's laptop when we used the Betas because of a required feature-set. 'Coincidentally enough' he was the only one who had the issue and the only heavy user of M$ Office 2004. I just attributed it to the Betas, but we shall see now that I have put him on a stable version after a complete Parallels wipe... No crashes, four days running!

 

Interesting. I first got Parallels at 3170, which was beta right? Then I upgraded to 3186 and 3188. I'll remove Parallels and try a fresh install of 3188. And I do use Word and Excel quite heavily.

 

Here un-install and re-install this way, it ensures things are removed and fresh, it is section D. http://forum.parallels.com/thread10384.html

 

Hello everybody,
We have reproduced this situation on one of our MacBooks. It seems to be a problem with memory. I've checked it and found many errors.
So, I must suggest you to check your MacBooks with Memtest.
Please download memory test program for Mac from http://matt.ucc.asn.au/memtest/ , record this *.iso image to CD and boot from it to check performance of your memory.

 

MemTest?

From the MemTest page:

On my MacBook 1st gen 1.83ghz, I get some errors at various locations around or below 1MB. Someone else with a MacBook Pro got the same thing, so I guess the BIOS (emulation) isn't giving a correct memory map

With that there, can we really rely on this tool to accurately discover memory errors? I'd doubt the folks at Apple would take a return for repair based on a tool that admits to false error reports. Can someone suggest a better memory check tool?

If there were errors in the memory, I'd guess we'd be seeing more kernel panics and not soo much sleepless macs.

 

I wouldn't say that is necesarily the issue... I have not had a single crash on the ATTY's laptop in OVER two weeks since I re-installed things and upgraded to the latest build. I don't have the old logs, but it seems to have been healed with 3188. At least my issue of Kernel Panics.

 

I have been having this problem as well, and I was directed to this discussion. It is the first time that I have heard of Parallels possibly being involved.

But My MBP won't sleep about 1 out of three times.

This only started with upgrading OSX to 10.4.9 - before that I never had a single problem.

Anyway, I will be following the Parallels angle too...

 

Same thing here occasionally. Once in a rare wild, it seems like it has shut down, but when I close the lid, the light on the latch comes on and I can not restart the machine. If I put my ear to the the system (MBP) I can hear the drive still spinning. i have to hold the power button to turn it totally off. Anyone else have that experience?

 

Interesting news...following Archy's advice, I downloaded and ran memtest. There were lots of errors reported. Now, I have two 1GB third-party DIMMs installed. So I tried to isolate them by testing them one at a time.

1. DIMM A tested perfect in my left slot.
2. DIMM B generated errors in that same slot
3. DIMM B generated errors in the right slot, which led me to suspect DIMM B, but then...
4. DIMM A generated errors in the right slot.

So at this point, I was unsure of my logic board and the DIMMs.

I put one my original Apple DIMMs in each slot and it tested fine in both. So I put the third-party DIMMs back in and they both tested good.

Conclusion: The only conclusion I could make was that my memory was OK and the act of reseating the chips several times exercised the contacts to the point that they made a good connection.

Recommendation: Try reseating your DIMMs, repeatedly if necessary. I'll be on the lookout for more sleep problems. Hopefully, there won't be any.

Chris

 

I actually get that at times with my PB G4 17", I find that if I hit buttons, wait a few seconds shut the lid, wait a few seconds, open the lid, hit buttons again, it will snap out of that.

Chris,
The order also seems to throw it at times, don't ask me why, but it was on my XServe.

 

More interesting memory trivia:

I discovered when I was testing each DIMM individually that one DIMM always showed up as DDR398 with a front side bus speed of 199MHz. The other DIMM showed up as DDR664 with a front side bus speed of 332MHz.

Also oddly, one logic board slot always reported the memory as DDR-I and the other one always reported DDR-II.

When I put both DIMMs back in, memtest said that all of my memory was DDR398 with a bus speed of 199 MHz. So I swapped the two DIMMs and now memtest reports DDR664 with a 332MHz bus speed.

Furthermore, my machine seems faster than before...either memtest is weird or swapping the DIMMs made a difference.

Chris

 

I have run Memtest several times with no reported errors.

I don't think this can be a memory issue as I never had a single problem in the year that I have had this MBP, until I updated to 10.4.9.

 

Have you tried doing a fresh install of Parallels?

 

OK. Today I just had the problem again. So I'm leaning away from a memory problem. I've also done a (very) fresh install of Parallels 3188.

 

me too

I have this problem (won't sleep and won't shutdown properly) frequently and my memtests run successfully. I've also noted that I have a problem printing to a network printer when it won't sleep, but this might be unrelated.

I'm not sure whether it is Parallels or not, but I'm running 3188. I'm running 10.4.9 and don't recall having the problem with 10.4.8.

 

When it happened to me today, I found this in my System Log:

Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOUSBWorkLoop::closeGate - interrupt Thread being held offEnabling XMM register save/restore and SSE/SSE2 opcodes
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: Started CPU 01
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOBluetoothHCIController::restartShutdownWL this is a wake from sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: System Wake

In my lay opinion, it looks like the computer went to sleep and immediately woke up. But what would cause that?

Chris

 

I don't know what wakes OS X from sleep - perhaps network service requests such as DHCP or DNS? If so then any VM activity that generates net traffic that OS X handles could shake it awake.