Frequently Asked Questions This chapter contains some commonly asked questions and problems pertaining to Sleeper, along with answers and solutions. If you have Internet access, the latest version of this list is available at Why does Sleeper warn about other "built-in power management features"? When you close the Sleeper control panel on Macintosh models that have built-in power management (PowerBooks, PCI PowerMacs), Sleeper checks to see if you are using any power saving features that might conflict with the options you have chosen in Sleeper. If you are using Sleeper's Energy Star or screen saver options, it will warn you if you are also using display dimming or power-off in the PowerBook or Energy Saver control panels. If you turn on disk sleep in Sleeper, it will remind you to turn off disk sleep in the PowerBook or Energy Saver control panels if you have it enabled there. If you get these warnings when Energy Saver is installed and you think you shouldn't, either disable the Energy Saver control panel and Energy Saver Extension, or make sure you have Energy Saver set up correctly (see Can I still use Apple's Energy Saver software, below). Can I still use Apple's Energy Saver software? Sleeper replaces nearly all of the features of Apple's Energy Saver 2.0 control panel, making it unnecessary unless you want to use Energy Saver's ability to shut down and start up your Macintosh at particular times of day. If you want to continue using Apple's Energy Saver software alongside Sleeper, you should make sure that Energy Saver and Sleeper are not trying to control the same things. Open the Energy Saver control panel, click on the "Show Details" button, and make sure that the sliders are set to "Never" for any actions that you already have Sleeper configured to perform. When you close the Sleeper control panel, it will check to make sure that Energy Saver is not duplicating any of its features, and will warn you if a conflict exists. If you disable Energy Saver entirely, Sleeper will ensure that none of your Macintosh's built-in energy saving features interfere with Sleeper's. My hard disk never spins down or keeps waking up. Something is accessing the disk. To more closely test the problem, use the hotkey to put the disk to sleep and then see how long it takes before it "spontaneously" awakens. Some possible culprits are listed below: The Finder: When "calculate folder sizes" is turned on in the Views control panel, the Finder will periodically check the sizes of files, reading the information from disk. Even when "calculate folder sizes" is turned off, the Finder will check some information periodically. To make sure that this checking does not wake the disk, set the disk cache in the Memory control panel to be 192K or higher. After Dark: Loading a screen dimmer module from disk will wake a sleeping disk. One way to avoid this when using After Dark's "Randomizer" module is to set it to "1 module" to avoid switching modules after After Dark has been activated. Norton Utilities FileSaver: This utility may access the disk during idle time, depending upon the settings you have used with it. Automatic compression or defragmenting utilities: If you have one of these set to run during idle time, it will spin up the disk to do its work. When using Stuffit SpaceSaver, for instance, the idle time compression option will keep Sleeper from putting the disks to sleep because it scans for files in need of compression. You have to set a very long idle delay or turn off this feature if you want your disk to stay asleep. File Sharing: If your Mac is on a network with file sharing enabled, someone at another Mac may use your hard disk. File sharing also periodically checks the disk to check for changes in permissions. You may have to increase the disk cache in the Memory control panel to 256K or more to prevent these checks from actually accessing the disk. Hourly Chimes: Playing sounds may cause the hard disk to spin back up, since the sound must often be loaded from your System disk to be played. Setting a clock program to chime regularly may therefore cause disk access. Now Toolbox: This component of Now Utilities seems to access the disk on some Macs, keeping the drives awake, but others report no problems. What's happening is still not clear, and we'd appreciate hearing from anyone who can establish some rhyme or reason to Now Toolbox's behavior. Now Tabs: This component of Now Utilities reportedly accesses the disk periodically whenever a window is in "tabbed" mode at the bottom of the screen. When I shut down, my disk drive spins down and back up again. This occurs on some NuBus-based PowerMacs, and it's still not clear why. To stop this behavior, command-option-click on the "Help" button in the Sleeper control panel, and turn off the "Spin down unmounted disks" option. Because we are still trying to diagnose this problem, please send email to support@stclairsw.com if it occurs on your Macintosh. We'd like to know the model of Macintosh, system software version, disk drivers, control panels and extensions you're using. The information you provide will help us narrow down the cause of this behavior. My Mac goes to sleep but will not wake up after several hours. There is a conflict with the Microsoft Office Manager extension that will cause this problem on some Macintoshes that have Microsoft Office installed. We recommend that you simply disable Microsoft Office Manager, since its benefit is relatively minor and it has been implicated in conflicts with other software besides Sleeper. My Mac locks up after my hard disk wakes up. If you are using FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit, there is an optional setting that can cause this to happen. In the driver options in Hard Disk Toolkit, make sure that the "Disable Unit Attention" is turned OFF. Special thanks to Tim Byars for alerting us to this problem.The only other occasion where this problem has been reported is with Syquest drives, as documented in Does Sleeper work with Syquest drives? Enabling my Daystar Turbo 601 or PowerPro 601 accelerator disables disk sleep. Daystar PowerPC accelerator cards contain SCSI Manager 4.3 in their ROM, but actually use the old SCSI Manager to interface to the internal SCSI bus. This confuses Sleeper, which thinks that SCSI Manager 4.3 should always take precedence over the old SCSI Manager. In the case of the Daystar cards, this results in Sleeper being unable to find any of the disks on the machine's original SCSI bus. To work around the problem, simply disable SCSI Manager 4.3 in Daystar's control panel. This prevents the SCSI Manager 4.3 code from loading at all, and thus avoids Sleeper's confusion. It will not affect performance in any way, since the new SCSI Manager 4.3 code is not used for the internal bus, even when the switch is on. Only users with an FWB SCSI Jackhammer card need to keep the SCSI Manager 4.3 switch turned on. Thanks to Paul Frye for bringing the problem to our attention, and the folks at Daystar for their swift, thorough responses to our technical inquiries. My screen dims and will not brighten again. If you are using both Sleeper and the screen saver Eclipse, Eclipse may try to remember the brightness of your screen while it is dimmed by Sleeper. This results in a dark screen that will not brighten. Using the Monitors or Monitors & Sound control panel to change the gamma setting on the monitor will return the screen to its proper brightness. I upgraded to System 7.6.1, and now Sleeper's screen saver won't work. This has been reported by several owners of NuBus-based PowerMacs with the PowerMac AV video card (6100/60av, 7100/66av, 8100/80av, etc). It appears that the "Monitors and Sound" control panel installed with System 7.6.1 doesn't initialize the gamma tables at startup, rendering them useless and thus preventing Sleeper from dimming the screen.There is already a workaround built into Sleeper for this. To enable it, do the following: 1.Open the Sleeper control panel. 2.Command-option-click on the "Info" icon in the control panel. 3.In the dialog box that appears, turn on the checkbox for "Work around the bug in the 660AV and 840AV built-in video." 4.Close the dialog and the Sleeper control panel and restart. The screen on my Performa 600, Quadra 660AV or 840AV, or PowerPro 601 accelerated Mac doesn't dim. There appears to be a bug in the initialization of the on-board video on the Performa 600, AV Quadras, and on machines equipped with the Daystar PowerPro 601 accelerator. If you start up with a non-multisync monitor set to 16 or 24 bit mode (thousands or millions of colors), modifications to the monitor's gamma table don't do anything, so the screen won't dim. To work around this, command-option-click on the "Info" icon in the Sleeper control panel and turn on the AV workaround checkbox. At startup, this will toggle the screen depth to 256 colors and back to your original setting, causing the screen to flicker, but also causing the gamma table to be correctly initialized. Will Sleeper work with my... [fax modem, bbs, backup] software? Sleeper should work with any software. It has no knowledge of what program is requesting data from the disk - it merely spins it down when it hasn't been used for a while, and spins it up when there is a request to read or write data. For fax modems, remember that it will take the disk a few seconds to spin up before the fax can be received. It's best to set your fax software to answer on the first ring to ensure that it can access the disk before the phone stops ringing. Why are some options disabled? Some of Sleeper's functions may be grayed out if your machine does not have the hardware to support them. The screen saver will be disabled on Macs that are not capable of displaying color. The Energy Star features will be disabled on machines that do not have the necessary video hardware to turn off an Energy Star compliant monitor. Will Sleeper work with my current screen saver? Sleeper will work with screen savers that support the 'SAVC' and 'SAVR' Gestalt selectors, such as After Dark. This means that the hotkey will put the disk to sleep and trigger an alternate screen saver if Sleeper's screen saver is turned off. If the "Spin down only when screen is dimmed" checkbox is used and Sleeper's screen saver is disabled, Sleeper will check for another screen saver instead. Note that when After Dark is active, Sleeper's Energy Star feature may not work. After Dark takes over your Macintosh so completely that Sleeper never gets an opportunity to check if it's idle. Disk sleep will work, however. Why do all my drives stay awake when I'm only using one? By default Sleeper keeps all disks awake if one is active. If you're working, you probably don't want to have a disk spin down. The Finder, standard file dialogs, and other parts of the Mac system access all the disks fairly frequently when your Mac is in use, so the disks will just keep spinning down and back up again, and you would have to stop and wait for them to do so. You can change this behavior by turning off the "Spin down all disks together" checkbox. Depending upon the extensions and control panels you have installed and how you use your Mac, this may or may not be more convenient for you. Does Sleeper watch for serial port and CPU activity? Sleeper doesn't have to. Unlike After Dark, Sleeper doesn't occupy the CPU when your Mac is "sleeping," so there's no need for the sort of monitoring that After Dark uses. Is Sleeper "Accelerated for PowerPC"? Yes. If the SCSI Manager on your system is running in native mode, Sleeper will install native code to do its work. Note, however, that in System 7.5.1 and prior (even on PowerMacs), the SCSI Manager runs in emulation. In this case, Sleeper installs 680x0 code, which runs faster than native code would because of the overhead of switching back and forth between native and emulated modes. To tell what code Sleeper has installed, command-click on the "Info" icon in Sleeper's control panel. Does Sleeper work on portable Macintoshes? Sleeper is not terribly useful on PowerBooks, since it provides the same functionality as the built-in Power Manager. It works, but is redundant so you probably will not find any value in it unless you have an external drive attached. Also, a PowerBook's screen should actually be turned off rather than dimmed, since any pattern in the LCD, white or black, can be "burned-in" according to Apple. Fortunately, burn-in on LCD displays is not permanent, and will fade away over time. Does Sleeper work with Syquest drives? While it may work with some Syquest mechanisms, we have seen problems on several occasions. In other words, make sure you have the checkboxes in the Sleeper control panel turned off for Syquest drives unless you'd like to experiment for yourself. Some Syquest drives will refuse to spin back up after being put to sleep. This appears to be an unfortunate side-effect of the Syquest being both a SCSI hard disk and a device with removable media: The SCSI-2 specification's STOP command shares the same operation code as the EJECT command, so Sleeper's attempt to send a STOP command to the drive is ambiguous, and the results depend upon the firmware in the drive controller's ROM. Bernd Weisshaar also reports that Sleeper can cause problems ejecting cartridges from Syquest 270 drives if sleep is enabled for those drives. To fix the problem, either make sure that Sleeper is not controlling the drive by turning off the checkbox for that SCSI ID in the Sleeper control panel, or command-option-click on the "Info" icon in the Sleeper control panel and turn off the "Spin down on unmount" feature in the Expert Options panel. How much power can Sleeper save? Sleeper's screen saver saves approximately 23% on your monitor's power consumption. When Sleeper is used on an Energy Star capable Macintosh with an Energy Star compliant monitor, the monitor's power use can be reduced by 90-100%. Power requirements for a few typical monitors are: Apple Multiple Scan 20 Operating: 165 Watts Energy-saver mode: less than 15 Watts AppleVision 1710 Operating: 150 Watts Energy-saver mode: 0 Watts Apple Multiple Scan 17 Operating: 150 Watts Energy-saver mode: 11 Watts Apple Multiple Scan 15 Operating: 90 Watts Energy-saver mode: less than 30 Watts Disk sleep will cut your hard drive's power consumption by 80-90%. Here are power consumption figures for some of the most commonly used disk drives in the Macintosh market, including their power requirements while asleep. Keep in mind that these are new models in which power consumption was a design concern. Many older disks (and large ones in particular) consume considerably more power. Seagate Barracuda ST-32550N (2.5 GB) Idle: 12.27 Watts Sleeping: 1.6 Watts Quantum Atlas XP31070 / 32150 (1075 / 2150 MB) Seek: 8.5 / 10.2 Watts Idle: 7.6 / 9.0 Watts Sleeping: 1.0 Watt (estimated) Quantum Fireball 1080 (1080 MB) Seek: 6.5 Watts Idle: 4.0 Watts Sleeping: 0.8 Watt Quantum Lightning 540 / 730 (540 / 730 MB) Seek: 6.3 Watts Idle: 4.3 Watts Sleeping: 0.8 Watt Quantum Trailblazer 420 / 850 (420 / 850 MB) Seek: 6.7 Watts Idle: 3.29 Watts Sleeping: 1.0 Watt Conner CFP1080S (1080 MB) Seek: 6.5 Watts Idle: 3.75 Watts Sleeping: 1.0 Watt (estimated) Micropolis 4221AV (2 GB) Seek: 11.5 Watts Idle: 10.5 Watts Sleeping: ~1.0 Watt (estimated) IBM DPES-30540 / 31080 (540 / 1080 MB) Seek: 6.4 / 6.9 Watts Idle: 2.8 / 3.3 Watts Sleeping: 1.3 Watts Sleeper has forgotten that I registered. Occasionally Sleeper's Preferences file will become corrupted (usually due to a system crash). This can cause Sleeper to forget that you entered your registration code, causing it to bother you with reminders at startup every 3 days. To solve the problem, simply throw the Sleeper Prefs file in the trash (it's in the Preferences folder in your System folder). You will need to reenter your registration code and your settings in the Sleeper control panel afterwards. If you've lost your registration code, contact us and we'll send it to you again.