Living With Apple's MacBook: On The Road

All the talk of energy efficiency at IDF today, coupled with the fact that I’m back in San Francisco for the second time in a week, has me thinking about the power management capabilities of the MacBook on which I’m typing this particular writeup. As I’ve mentioned several times in the past (see here for the series), the system’s long exhibited some unpredictable and undesirable behaviour related to standby mode entry and subsequent shutdown. As of this morning, I think I’ve got many (but not all) of the issues figured out, and as part of the solution I owe you all (as well as Apple, who it appears is the unfortunate victim of misdirected past blame on my part) a sheepish apology.

Last Monday and Tuesday, the MacBook was driving me absolutely bonkers. I’d think I’d put it in standby, only to later realize (by virtue of feeling its uncomfortably warm case, or hearing its fan noise, or noticing that the LCD backlight was still on) that the sleep attempt was unsuccessful. Subsequent system shutdowns also hung, necessitating undesireable manual intervention via a lengthy depress of the power switch. After referencing a number of Apple-focused resources, I think I now know what was happening.

Last Monday’s trip to San Francisco involved an extended public transportation chain:

• An eight-block walk to a nearby Sacramento Light Rail station
• Light Rail to Amtrak’s shared downtown Sacramento station
• Amtrak to BART’s shared Richmond station
• BART to Montgomery Street Station in downtown San Francisco
• A two-block walk to Muni’s Sansome-at-Sutter Street bus stop
• Muni bus 3 to Pacific Heights
• A two-block walk to my hotel, and
• A roundtrip taxi ride to AMD’s intro event in the Presidio

On Tuesday morning, I retraced my walk-to-walk path in reverse (i.e. hotel-to-home).

My transfers were tight, and the one-plus-hour Amtrak delay to Richmond didn’t help. I was busy working on the laptop every chance I got, and I’d tend to rapidly punch the power button, select ’standby’ from the pop-up window, jam the laptop in my bag and sprint for the exit door of whatever vehicle I was in at the time (an admittedly harried procedure that, in my defense, I’d long employed and seemed to be acceptable to the MacBook’s predecessor, my Dell Inspiron 700m).

What I suspect, after perusing a number of online forums (all of which, ironically, focused on MacBook behaviour under OS X), is that because the system was in motion enroute to its final resting place in my satchel during the transition to standby, the sudden-motion sensor got triggered. This is a scenario that Apple’s Boot Camp power management code apparently doesn’t adequately comprehend, leading to the MacBook’s subsequent erratic behaviour.

By slowing myself down a bit and ensuring that the MacBook’s front LED was pulsing (signifying system sleep) before I stuck it in its RadTech sleeve (and from there into my bag), I significantly improved its standby stability through the remainder of last week as well as this morning. However, I was still encountering unable-to-enter-standby-or-subsequently-shutdown scenarios more often than should have been the case. Additionally:

• The MacBook’s Wi-Fi subsystem sometimes refused to disable
• Its Bluetooth subsystem sometimes exhibited amnesia (i.e. forgot about already-paired peripherals) and blindness (i.e. didn’t see ‘em, until I rebooted the system), and
• Most baffling of all, on one occasion Windows insisted that the MacBook was AC-connected when the system was actually running on batteries (I fixed that particular snafu by resetting the SMC)

In spite of extensive Google searching, I was unable to uncover substantial evidence of other folks having the same sorts of issues, either when running OS X or (as in my case) Windows XP. I thought that was odd, given the notable popularity of the MacBook product line, and it tipped me off that something relatively unique to my software setup was probably causing the problems. My a-ha moment occurred this morning on the Amtrak ride down to Richmond, when I remembered that I’d installed (and recommended that you install, a suggestion which I hereby rescind) SpeedswitchXP.

I reset the system’s power management profile to a Windows default scheme, uninstalled SpeedswitchXP, rebooted for good measure, and have subsequently had trouble-free operation all day (fingers crossed that I haven’t just jinxed myself!). Plus, as a happy side effect, the HDD also seems to be much speedier, probably because SpeedswitchXP isn’t mucking with its power management settings; I’m able to navigate and manipulate my voluminous Outlook database much faster than in the past. I’ll pass along my findings to Sound on Sound Magazine, which published an article that made me aware of SpeedswitchXP in the first place. In retrospect, given that the latest version of the program is over 1 year old, perhaps my problems shouldn’t have been such a surprise…