Sleep timer won't work in MacBook

Recently bought a new Macbook 13” laptop running quite well with Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 installed into it. Everything is well set and fine. I have installed all the recent and latest updates into it as far as I know. Before 10.6 my laptop was running 10.5 OS X Leopard into it, and even this use to work quite well. I am not sure how exactly my system’s sleep mode use to work with that earlier version. Whenever the counter time of the machine matches the amount of the time that I use to specify, the system use to enter the sleep mode and then displays a kind of pulsing power light, but then after I upgraded the machine to snow leopard, rare cases where I remember the sleep mode working capability as I actually do not notice how the system exactly sleeps. Most of the time whenever i am done with my work on my Mac, I simply turn it off that’s it.

But recently from few days ago I have been doing certain R&Ds with my machine regarding the sleep mode and found that the sleep mode is actually not working properly. once I tried keeping my machine as it is untouched for an hour and before doing so I already set the counter timing for not more than 10 minutes but even after setting the sleep mode timer my system didn’t even displayed the pulsing power light but other than that a constant growing power light. Overall I have noticed that the sleep timer won’t work through the “Energy Saver” in System Preference but the sleep timed display works properly without fail.

I too have the same problem but I seriously don’t understand where exactly the problem lies. But after reading out your thread I can make out that the symptoms are almost the same so therefore i guess if yours is solely with the sleep mode then surely I too have something to do with the sleep mode. Many of the people suggested me with many solutions but unfortunately none of them worked for me. the first thing I did was booted my system MacBook in a sleep mode then I used the Disk Utility to repair the Disk Permission through booting the machine from the Mac OS X Snow Leopard installation DVD, then I tried resetting the Intel based NVRAM as my PRAM is used by PowerPC based Macs but none of them worked for me until yet. Actually the thing is that I am not very much sure with the main cause of the issue so therefore I am unable to get a proper solution for the same. Also once I tried with resetting SMC i.e. System Management Controller but as usual no use.

One of my friend did checked my system and told me that the spotlight of the machine is actually not indexing the hard drive which simply starts up my Macbook and then it does nothing and then however wait for the scheduled computer sleep. The scheduled computer sleep isn’t working at all.

If you really want to know what exactly is causing such issue in your system then definitely you should first know about the Sleep mode. This mode is nothing but just a low power energy saving technology that which proves to be very much beneficial both economically and environmentally and also it helps to extend and take the life of the machine’s battery and display to a higher level. Now if your machine is not going into a sleep mode even after setting a low counter timing then there might be certain possibilities due to which your Mac stays awake and doesn’t goes into a sleep mode even if you are not using the keyboard or the mouse. They might be due to watching a DVD movie or due to listening to a iTunes music library. Or there might few chances of automated backup running into your machine somewhere in the background. Downloading some kind of large sized files without your knowledge can also be a reason for such issue. Anyways for any kind of official help or troubleshooting you can also visit the apple’s official site and go to "How can I make out what is causing a sleep issue and how to resolve it?"

Ok, so your sleep mode isn’t working at all. You need not have to worry about this thing if your system is not going into the sleep mode then you can try out the either way, I mean you can for the manual alternate way. There are several different ways through which you can simply put your computer to sleep. I have got one amongst them, if possible just try out the following one and let me know the result:

• First go to Apple Menu and from the Apple Menu you may find several options, amongst those options chose Sleep
• Now after choosing the Sleep option you need to press the computer’s power button. Remember one thing that you are supposed to click the Sleep only after you press the power button
• After you are done with both the sleep and power button option you need to close the display of your MacBook system
• What you need to do is now leave the machine as it is untouched and inactive for at least certain amount of time specified in the Energy saver preference
• Now make sure that you schedule the sleep activity to only occur at some specific time during the whole day in the Energy Saver Pane inside the System Preference option

I have got something interesting for you, look I am not sure what exactly is causing your issue but other than this I only knows that you machine is due to some reason unable to get into the sleep mode and therefore you are in search of some remedy for the same. Anyways i that is the case then I think I can surely help you out with a proper solution. Now you can do is get Utility software called as PleaseSleep. PleaseSleep is a kind of software that is designed especially for the Mac OS X system that actually helps us in putting the system to the sleep mode even if any other kind of application or bug is preventing the system going into it.

What actually happens is PleaseSleep sits in the background and then waits for the sleep timer which has been set by you in the Energy Saver Preferences Pane. Now depending upon the preferences that you have set PleaseSleep will somehow try out to put the machine to sleep it encounters the actually sleep timer. This Utility is very much easy and quite simple to configure, we can easily enable and disable it and also can access the preferences through the system menu bar icon. We can also choose the PleaseSleep to activate the sleep function almost all the time or we can also tell this utility to activate the sleep function itself only during the accessibility of certain application. Just download this software and use it and also let me know whether it helped you in your problem or not.

There are lots of things that are new in the latest version of PleaseSleep software. First of all its quite compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Then it also supports the native 64-bit. Other than the compatibility PleaseSleep has also introduced a new option in order to always enable itself when it is lauched, also you can get a new option to select a new different menu icon. Then there’s another option added to the utility for monitoring the energy saver timer with either of the option i.e. computer or display sleep timer. In order to reset the system activity for some much better force sleep result another new option is available. Other than the new option also Unix executables now can be simply added to the exceptions list. the issue of duplicate entries in the application lists has been somehow fixed now, so you need not have to worry about it if you faced such issue in the older version of this software. Lastly and the most importantly it this software supports only Mac OS X 10.5 or later version but not older than that and only supports intel.

Look there are many reason why your system doesn’t go to sleep as per your necessary and requirement based on the Energy Saver Settings. You can simply configure Energy Saver Preference in order to set you system to sleep automatically even after a specific amount of time. if you research you might find an internal counter called as sleep timer that actually monitors the maount of time that your machine has been inactive. Now what happens is when the counter timing and the amount of time you specified matches, the computer simply enters into sleep mode and then displays a pulsing power light. There are certain things that reset the sleep timers and then prevent the computer system from sleeping, they are as follows:

• Accessing hard drive. Now here what happens is even if you are not using the machine there might be a running application that could be accessing the drive like while downloading large files or simply listening to music as already stated above.
• accessing a portable Mac system’s trackpad or moving the mouse simply means resetting the sleep timer. Pressing the mouse button or pressing a key on the keyboard is also one of the reasons for the same.
• Then some of the system preferences settings could also be the reason for sleep timer changes, then expansion cards, then addition drives like USB, FireWire, DVD, or CD drives

You might find a Preference List that you somehow need to delete or thrash. First of all you need o quit the System Preferences. Then you need to go to Macintosh HD/Library/System Configuration Preferences and then from there you need to drag the following file to the desktop:
com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

Whenever you change the sleep timer the above file is what exactly gets changed. Anyways after that you can launch the System Prefs then go to Energy Saver and then set the sleep time as per your requirement.

I know this is not related to you but for those who use a Macintosh computer, they can also try to put your computer to sleep manually with the help of any infrared receiver and an Apple remote. You need to just hold down the play and pause button the remote until and unless the computer goes to sleep and then when the system is in sleep just by pressing any of the button on the remote you can simply wake up the machine.

If you have a Macintosh computer with an infrared (IR) receiver, you can put your computer to sleep using an Apple Remote. Hold the Play/Pause button on the remote until the computer goes to sleep. When your computer is in sleep, pressing any button on the remote will wake the computer.