Getting a PowerBook to Stop Breathing

August 17, 2006 - 11:28pm

Jeff Arcel asks:

Question

Is there a possible way to stop the pulsating “sleep” light on a powerbook, via AppleScript or some other way? Aside from Shutting the computer off, of course.

Answer

There are two ways to do this, both in hardware.

Duct tape.
Removing about twelve screws, lifting off the top case, and then busting or masking the LED inside.

Essentially, there’s nothing you can do in software because that function is controlled in firmware, and it’s not an exposed setting in Open Firmware for the PPC machines. As Intel machines don’t have much access at all to their firmware, even if it was possible there it wouldn’t be pretty getting to it.

Duct tape is always removable, though. I’d go there, first.

About Adam Knight

Location
Austin, TX

Home page/site
http://www.hopelessgeek.com/

Author Biography

Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed].

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August 18, 2006 - 10:34am

ericrounds said

Keeping the laptop open and allowing it to go to sleep will avoid the annoying pulsing light…..

August 19, 2006 - 4:29pm

Adam Knight said

Not on my MacBook Pro…

August 20, 2006 - 9:19am

JC said

i think eric is confusing display sleep with CPU sleep. on older powerbooks, the LED only flashed if the CPU was sleeping.

this has, though, been changed in the intel Macs. Now, the LED is solid on display sleep, and pulses on CPU sleep.

August 19, 2006 - 7:08am

endymion said

> Keeping the laptop open and allowing it to go to sleep will avoid the annoying pulsing light…..

How?? On my original iBook, Pismo, chiclet iBook, and AlBook, the pulsing light comes on once it’s asleep…

However, if you have a later model Mac that supports Safe Sleep, then you can enable that feature and set it to immediate activation on sleep, and it will power off once the contents of RAM have been stored on the HD, leaving you with no pulsing light.

9 times out of 10 it wakes from sleep fine on my AlBook… the 10th time everything comes up from sleep and the clock on my menubar ticks, but I don’t have working input devices. I believe the last generation of G4 ‘Books (with 2-finger scrolling support) and all the intel Macs support this. The G4 minis also support this.

July 29, 2007 - 5:52pm

sbeam said

I also find the pulsating light really annoying, and way too bright. It lights up my entire room when i turn the light off, so i tend to have a habbit of throwing a t-shirt over it when i go to sleep

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