Hibernation problems on OSX after using smartsleep

Recently lifehacker.com featured an application called smartsleep. I’m usually an early adopter of tools like this so I downloaded it and installed it on my intel based macbook pro before really thinking about the impact it might have on my day to day work (not like me at all… heh heh). Anyway, after having it running for a few weeks I noticed that my computer didn’t always sleep as expected and quite often the battery would just die and I’d lose my work.

The problem:
smartsleep has no uninstall since it is just a pref pane.

The solution:
Turns out that all your power settings are stored in a single plist (preferences file). Once you delete it OSX will automatically recreate it. Here’s what I did…

  1. Delete smartsleep pref pane (/Library/Preference Panes/SmartSleep.prefPane)
  2. Delete OSX power settings plist file (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist)
  3. Open System Preferences => Energy Saver (you might have to change at least one setting for OSX to recreate the previously deleted plist file)

That’s it. No restart necessary. I hope this is helpful to others.

I discovered the “pmset” terminal command while trying to fix this. You can set your power settings using this utility if you prefer the terminal.

For more information you can visit apple’s website. I found this reference helpful…
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

4 Replies to “Hibernation problems on OSX after using smartsleep”

  1. Amazing! Thank you so very freakin’ much!!! 🙂
    I’ve been looking for (and bugged with) for at least a few years.
    What a relieve at last!! Thumbs up!!

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