Comments on: Sleep your iMac screen – instantly

By: Seb

Seb — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:29:33 +0000

I have a late 2008 macbook and am suffering from the same issue where the screen turns back on after ~10 seconds. I tried the dashboard widget and the ctrl-shift-eject methods. I haven’t tried the hot corner as this looks to be more annoying that anything, even if it works. As others have posted, it is most likely due to activity on the machine. I am currently backing up to mozy.com (that’s the only thing running) and would like to sleep the display without sleeping the whole machine as that would disable my network. Is there a way to disable wake on LAN or something like that?

I am posting this mostly to derail postings that suggest it is caused by a bluetooth mouse or whatever. I have nothing connected, no disc in the DVD-ROM no external device what so ever other than the power adapter connected. I also have all recent OS X updates installed.

By: nate

nate — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 03:42:57 +0000

@matt — thanks, but the screen goes black, but the backlight is still on.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:26:59 +0000

@nate: See http://mac.elated.com/2007/02/02/why-cant-you-turn-off-the-screen/#comment-12240

By: nate

nate — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:48:40 +0000

I’d really like to be able to sleep the display on my iMac, but continue to play video on an external screen (Samsung TV). When I use the hot-corner, both displays “sleep” so the TV loses the signal.

Is there a way to only sleep the main display? I have mirroring turned off.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:49:33 +0000

do you have a bluetooth mouse? If so it could be that the mouse is being moved (possibly by the drive spooling up and moving the desk) which is waking the computer. I had this happen until i realized that the mouse was the culprit

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:42:06 +0000

John, that’s odd. I haven’t seen that problem with the Leopard sleep display. Actually, tell a lie – it did happen last night for some reason, but that’s the first time it’s happened for me!

Maybe the 10.5.3 update will fix it for you?

By: John

John — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 02:55:30 +0000

I’ve tried the Hot Corner and Ctrl-Shift-Eject. They both work, but never for more than a minute or two, then it pops back on, and even at the lowest brightness setting, the 24 inch iMac lights up a room. Very annoying.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:48:45 +0000

If anyone finds out how to KEEP the display off, like when running Time Machine / Azureus / VisualHub in the background that would be super.

I cannot believe there is no way to turn the thing off and keep it off when there is activity.

By: Chris Karcher

Chris Karcher — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:30:55 +0000

I’ve written a Leopard display sleeper dashboard widget, available at http://www.chriskarcher.net/software/displaysleeper

Only after reading this post did I discover that you could also hit Ctrl-Shift-Eject, but I decided to publish the widget nonetheless.

By: Schremmer.Alain

Schremmer.Alain — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:35:34 +0000

With our new iMac we can connect a DVI projector and show DVDs in the mirror setting. Two problems though:

1) The iMac screen stays on and I have not been able to set the iMac to sleep while keeping the projector on.

2) The iMac does better than XGA (1024×768) but as soon as it senses the projector (always semi-on), it picks XGA which is a hassle when just working with the iMac.

Could scripts or anything see to that?

Regards
–schremmer