Scheduled Shut Down with a mind of it's own

[misterman8]

I have my scheduled shut down set at 11:30 pm. So far today it has brought up the countdown "you have scheduled shut down in 10... minutes" window at 10:27 am, and now 7:32 pm... That's twice today. Its done this for the past few days, no specific time repeating itself. I usually fall asleep watching a movie (hence the shutdown acts as a sleep type thing), and I wake up and the computer is off, I can't vouch for the specific time it shuts off, so I don't know if it shuts off at the actual time its scheduled to or another random time throughout the night. I have an iBook G4, running the most current version of OS X, all updated and everything. I have forced the maintenance, checked the disk, and repaired permissions, even though I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with any of those. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[SC68Cal]

Is the clock on your computer being regularly synced from the Internet? You could have a depleted battery on the logic board (CMOS battery? I forget) that has the clock getting all screwy

 

[misterman8]

The clock (at least the one in the menu bar) is synced and dead on accurate.

 

[yellow]

You need to test it buy changing the shutdown time to 5 minutes in the future from now and stay awake long enough to see if it shuts down. Otherwise, you may want to perform a PMU reset (apple website will tell you how), and maybe remove the Power Management preference in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

 

[opusthe2nd]

My iMac falls asleep, I then come back and it has shut off. I have not set it to do this. I cant for the life of me figure out why it does.

 

[misterman8]

You need to test it buy changing the shutdown time to 5 minutes in the future from now and stay awake long enough to see if it shuts down. Otherwise, you may want to perform a PMU reset (apple website will tell you how), and maybe remove the Power Management preference in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

Ok... Well, I've done all of that. Yes it goes off when it's supposed to. And it is still trying to shut itself off at random times throughout the day.

This may be off topic, but it may not, so in the interest of full disclosure... I have recently had 2 other problems that remain unresolved... 1) my external hard drive is not consistently recognized (it seems to be contingent on the physical position of the drive relative to the iBook probably a cord/connector issue) and the color and brightness of my screen seem a bit off as of late.

 

[yellow]

Hmm, trying to shut itself off during the day is a strange issue.

Not too much I can offer as a suggestion. Power management is user independant, so trying a different user won't help you at all. I always hate to suggest a reinstall of OS X, but that might be your best bet.

As for the external.. my best thought would be that the cable is bad and should be replaced.

And for the LCD, try hitting the Displays Prefpane and clicking the Color tab, and Calibrating for a new profile. If the brightness is up all the way, then it could be a hardware connection problem between the LCD and the logic board.