Apple's help forums don't seem to have anything useful for me, so here we go. Somebody here must know something useful.

Background: my home computer is a PowerMac G4, dual 1.0GHz processors, with 1GB of RAM. This is one of the models with dual CD slots, rather than the newer "mirror" ones that, among other things, have a better memory architecture.

Anyway, I like the idea that my computer can go to sleep by itself so I have the feature enabled. It saves power, and it also makes a whole lot less noise when it's asleep. Recently (starting around OS X, v10.2.4 or so), it's been having trouble waking up. I'll see my old screen, which will promptly go grey and give me a dialog box telling me I have to reboot my computer by holding down the power button. Yummy.

There's nothing particularly revealing in the system log:

Jul 4 16:10:01 DapperMac CRON[805]: (root) CMD ( /sw/sbin/anacron -s)
Jul 4 16:10:01 DapperMac anacron[806]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2003-07-04
Jul 4 16:10:01 DapperMac anacron[806]: Normal exit (0 jobs run)
Jul 4 16:43:29 DapperMac syslogd: restart
Jul 4 16:43:29 DapperMac mach_kernel: standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us
Jul 4 16:43:29 DapperMac mach_kernel: vm_page_bootstrap: 124948 free pages
...
Jul 4 16:43:30 DapperMac /usr/libexec/panicdump: Error (-1) setting variable - 'aapl,panic-info'
Jul 4 16:43:30 DapperMac SystemStarter: crash reporter (244) did not complete successfully.
Jul 4 16:43:30 DapperMac root: setting hostname to DapperMac.local.

Presumably, the cron job is what put the computer to sleep. Then, the next log entry is from the machine rebooting, and there's apparently no crash dump of any kind to indicate what went wrong.

This behavior happens maybe once per week. It's often enough that's it's annoying, but it's not 100% repeatable. The computer is basically stock. I've added a second hard drive, but that's it. Of course, there's a ton of stuff hanging off the USB ports. Should I try unplugging all that stuff? The only recent addition that might possibly be related is my Onkyo SEU-55 USB sound card. I've noticed that playback through the external sound card has pops and clicks, while the internal sound output is clean. I have no special drivers installed; it's just using Apple's built-in USB audio drivers.


Then, once we solve this problem, maybe we can figure out why wake-on-LAN isn't working. But, one thing at a time...