New 27" iMac waking and shutting down by itself

[mackaydesign]

I have had my new iMac (27" 2.93GHz 8GB RAM) for 6 days and I experienced an interesting situation last night: The machine was asleep and it powered-on by itself. I wasn't sitting at/near it, I watched it turn on from across the room. Not waking, but a start-up sequence. I looked over surprised when I heard the Apple chime. I went to check on it a few minutes later and it was shut down... in which I thought it was asleep again...

I specifically purchased this machine to work on photography and design projects... I guess it goes without saying these are critical projects and I can't afford losing work when and if the machine blinks out again.

Could this have something to with the energy saver settings?

I hope this is an isolated incident... but any help/suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Detrius]

No, it's not the energy saver settings. The SMC controls this stuff, so reset the SMC.

This is completely unrelated to your hard drive, and therefore, the state of your data is unrelated. Though, it's always good to have backups.

 

[mackaydesign]

Thanks Detrius.

I've discovered on Apple.com forums that the above issue is related to incompatible 3rd party RAM issues:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2258132&start=0&tstart=0

I had a total of 8gb, 4 Apple, 4 Crucial. Turns out many users have had sudden shutdowns with the additional 3rd party memory.

I removed the Crucial memory last night, and so far so good... I'll be re-upgrading to Samsung memory which users report having no known issues.

Good to know about the SMC reset... though I hope I'll never have to use it.

Backups. Yes. I have a backup of my backup too.