[G4] Flame Wars/Sleep Problems

[Eric Smith]

Mike Bechtold wrote:

> Robert: I've read that there is a bug in 10.4 and
> below that prevents a PPC with a USB card from 
> sleeping. The bug was purportedly fixed with Leopard.
> Did the problem show up before or after the USB card
> was installed?

I think you're right. I have a USB 2.0 card in my G4
Sawtooth, and the system used to have a problem sleeping
when there was a device connected to the card and powered on
(at least some devices like HDDs; I'm not sure if it happened
with all devices). What would happen is that the system would
start to sleep but not fully sleep, so it would be in a
zombie-like state with the monitor in low-power mode but
the drives still powered up and spinning. Since it didn't
fully sleep it couldn't be awakened, and the only possibility
was to power-cycle (which I hate to do).

With Leopard this got better and the system was able to sleep
if there were powered-on devices connected to the USB card.
But now I have another problem: the system gradually got flaky
about sleeping automatically (i.e., from the power saving setting),
and now it won't sleep automatically at all. But it does sleep
OK if I explicitly tell it to.

Eric S.