After installing leopard I brought a new hdd to take advantge of Time Machine. A great backup tool as I am sure you are aware. But since then my mac would never go to sleep. After much searchig and deactivating Time Machine I discovered that it was not the source of my problems.

Again, more seaching. I looked to are what apps were running and there was nothing out of the ordinary. But still my mac would not sleep. I eventually just lived with it. It is a good idea anyway to leave it on occasinaly so I can do all it housework whilst you sleep.

But enough was enough. I was more bothered that I didn’t know why.

More searching. And eventually I discovered that you can use the Console to see what processes are happening and check the system logs. I found put that mysql server was running and failing. Every ten seconds. Bingo. It was my machine running as a server and failing that stopped the sleep mode kicking in.

I used to use leopard as a server for development work with php and mysql. But I disovered xamp and that made life a whole lot easier. So I must have installed an mysql update and not configured it correctly.

To fix I reinstalled mysql buy used the version for 10.4 rather than 10.5 and made sure I selected ppc rather than intel (fell into that trap before)

So am really writting this post so if others can’t get their mac go to sleep. This may be the reason. If not use the process viewer to keep an eye on what is running and use the console to see the system logs. They reveal a lot and ultimatly ended my ten months of a no sleeping mac.

EDIT

Was all fine and basking in the glory of seeking the standby light pulse as beautifully as it does. But when I went to use mysql. It failed.

So I reinstalled xampp but after I did the error in the cosole came up again.

On a mission I googled further and found that there was a plist for mysql in the launchDaemon folder. I removed it an restarted and all is well.

My guess is that the xampp installation of mysql confuses the built in or seperatly installed mysql. The plist was trying to boot the local version failing then retrying every ten secpnd and that is why I got the constant errors.

Sounds simple all laid out like that. Oh well.