Problem with Mac Sleep - Is it Coherence? A Bug?

D

driver49

Member
I discovered the "Coherence" feature in Parallels last week. Then I started having problems with the MacBook freezing in "Sleep" mode.

It has now happened twice: I close the lid, and the machine appears to go to sleep. But when I return, the fan is running and I cannot reawaken the screen. Have to do a complete cold boot (shut off/restart).

This sorta sucks, because the "sleep" function in the MacBook is one of the features I like that I could never get to work with a pure XP machine, and while I hear that "sleep" is now a feature of Vista, I just canceled my order for a Dell XPS m1330 because they lied to me about the ship date, which has been pushed back to the end of August. THEN I started having problems with "sleep" on the Mac! Irony of Ironies?

It occurs to me that this has started happening since I started closing the lid with Parallels running in "Coherence," so I wonder if this is the cause of the "die-ing in its sleep" phenomenon, and/or if it's a bug in Parallels.

Has anybody else experienced this problem? Has it been addressed in the newer versions of Parallels?

My Apple Care rep walked me through "resetting the hardware/sleep mode" by taking out the AC and removing the battery. But I'm going to stop using Coherence when I put the computer to sleep for a while and see if the problem goes away that way.

Too many variables, I know...

Thanks,

--PS


I'm running buid 4128 and would as soon leave it that was
 
Same problem here, although with a Mac Pro. In our case this behavior has contributed to corrupted VMs. Due to those issues we have stopped using Parallels altogether.

Looks like SWsoft has to have a serious look at some of these issues.

Jurgen
 
It has been my experience that you need to suspend your VM BEFORE closing the lid. This solved my sleep problems. I wish you could just close the lid but for me it has resulted in very bizarre behavior of the VM/Mac
 
It's Always Something With Wind-blows, huh?

MarkHolbrook said:
It has been my experience that you need to suspend your VM BEFORE closing the lid. This solved my sleep problems. I wish you could just close the lid but for me it has resulted in very bizarre behavior of the VM/Mac
Click to expand...

When you say "suspend" do you mean "pause" ? "Stop" closes the VM altogether and that I would really rather not have to do. Defeats the whole purpose of "sleep" in my case.

I could close the lid just fine for the first two weeks I had the machine. Apparently it was waiting until a) my two weeks return-to-Apple period was up and b) I'd canceled the order for the Dell.

For now I'm going to just try closing the lid with the VM in non-coherence mode. That always worked before, keep your fingers crossed it doesn't happen again.

--PS
 
The suspend command is grayed out on my menu; as far as I can recall it has always been so. I have been using the pause command instead prior to putting the Mac to sleep--works OK so far. MarkHolbrook, why does it take 15 seconds--seems like you're doing something more than a simple click to put it in suspend.

James
 
I have no idea why your suspend command is grayed out. That is weird.

Suspend writes the entire contents of the VM memory to a disk file. This takes about 15 seconds. It then stops the VM (how I'm not sure).

The VM is no longer running and is "suspended". When I start it again (using the green arrow) it takes about 15 seconds to reload that file and the VM is EXACTY as it was left with all programs currently running.

Not sure how this differs from pause.

M
 
Interesting.

Taking even 15 seconds to suspend the VM (and save it to the HDD) is hassle compared to just closing the lid, that's for sure. Seems to me that if Parallels can work within the MacOS without corrupting it's functions, then it should be able to put the machine to sleep without any further ado.

Like I say, it worked fine for me until I tried leaving the computer in "coherence" mode, with the taskbar separated from the Win desktop and the programs all floating in their own windows. It wasn't until I started doing that that the machine had trouble going to/waking up from sleep.

So I'm going to try it this way for a while -- just not leaving the machine in coherence when I close the lid, and see if that works like it used to.

Thanks,

--PS
 
I get this if I have a Windows/parallels app in the foreground. If I bring a OSX app to the foreground, it sleeps just fine. Don't ask me why.
 
That makes some sense, actually

milesce said:
I get this if I have a Windows/parallels app in the foreground. If I bring a OSX app to the foreground, it sleeps just fine. Don't ask me why.
Click to expand...

Do you use Coherence or just leave everything in the Parallels desktop window?

Your experience makes some sense, at least; if a Parallels is the foreground, the machine might lose some underlying MacOS protocols like sleep mode.

I still suspect "Coherence" as the culprit in my case. I did not use Coherence all day yesterday and went into sleep mode with no trouble coming out several times.

The next thing I'm going to try is going into Coherence while I'm working but coming out before I close the lid. But I'm not going to do that until I see how long I can go before I need to reboot again.

Thanks,

--PS
 
For the benefit of anybody who's following this thread:

I can now eliminate both Coherence specifically and Parallels/Windows generally as the cause of my sleep/wake problem.

Friday night, the MacBook did it's "not asleep/won't wake" trick again. I turned it off. Next morning I reset the hardware (remove AC, remove battery, hold down the power button). I did not start Parallels or Windows all day, but when I closed the lid around 5:00 PM and re-opened it around 7:00, it was frozen again.

Now Apple is telling me that it's the system board and I may have to replace it.

I have an appt at the Genius Bar on Monday and I'll report in again after that.

--PS
 
I experienced this for the first time last night actually. When i rebooted back into tiger, i read the report it asked me to send to apple, and i saw a parallels kext in it... So i assumed it was parallels fault XD
 
I've had the same problem with my MacBook ever since I started using Parallels. In fact, there is another thread that I started on this topic, but we never reached any solutions. I always Quit Parallels before I put the machine to sleep and it still happens. I am 100% convinced that it's a bug in one of the Parallels KEXTs. Hopefully it will either be fixed eventually, or maybe the problem won't show up once I upgrade to Leopard. Until then, I just live with it by not relying on the "lid close" to put the machine to sleep. I always put the machine to sleep before I close the lid. If the machine won't sleep, then I know it's messed up and I have a chance to quit all my apps and restart. Usually it won't restart and I have to hold the power button down to force a shutdown, but at least my data is safe.
 
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