[Mac-users] macbook insomnia

[Peter Jackson]

I had a potentially serious incident the other day, which doesn't  
seem to be well-explained in web references I followed.  The macbook  
which was supposed to be sleeping went deaf and became very hot.

When I'm working on the move, I generally just close the lid of my  
macbook, it goes to sleep and consumes very little power.  This has  
worked properly for a couple of months.

Last week, at the end of a day at a client site, I *think* I deviated  
from my usual behaviour and pressed the 'sleep' item in the apple  
menu. The machine appeared to go to sleep.

When I got home about 90 minutes later, I noticed I could hear a fan  
running.  The machine in my bag was quite hot, fan running, but  
nothing on the screen when I opened it.  It responded to the caps  
lock key, the operating light was off, it responded to the brightness  
control so I could make the screen light up to a uniform shade of  
grey.  The machine did not respond through a wired network connection.

In the end, I had to force a reboot by continuous press of the power  
button.

Prior to this incident I was running Mac OS X 10.4.8 and I'd recently  
installed X11, OpenOffice and a tool called WakeOnLan (which I'm  
pretty sure wasn't running at the time of the incident).

I'm reporting this because someone I was working with at the client  
has a macbook pro and he said that something similar had happened to  
him recently too and browsing various mac-related sites found  
anecdotes about similar-sounding incidents with no conclusive  
explanation. Left in that state inside a bag I imagine thermal damage  
could ensue.

Anyone know more?  I guess I will shut the thing down completely  
during my long haul flights next week.

Pute