WhiteStar Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 I had posted earlier about some issues with my MBP which I believed to be related to input remapper. As it turns out, the one about sleep mode is not related at all to input remapper. I was having a problem with Windows crashing every time it resumed from sleep mode. As it turns out, the problem is strictly related to Google Updater. Yes! believe it or not, as soon as I disabled Google updater from starting up automatically, and removed the Google bar from Firefox 2, I’ve had no more crashes when waking up my windows MBP (and Firefox crashes are done with also). However, I’m still having the other problems: 1. screen flicker 2. keyboard backlight flickers on/off 3. mouse movement can get very jerky, and it often does 4. music in iTunes stutters badly All these coincide with CPU usage spikes. When I monitor CPU usage, I notice IR is refreshing often and these issues coincide with the refresh although they do not happen every cycle. Other than that, fantastic tool. MBP 15” 2.33 Ghz, 2 GB, 120 GB HD, 256 MB ATI X1600 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beliyaal Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 I had posted earlier about some issues with my MBP which I believed to be related to input remapper. As it turns out, the one about sleep mode is not related at all to input remapper. I was having a problem with Windows crashing every time it resumed from sleep mode. As it turns out, the problem is strictly related to Google Updater. Yes! believe it or not, as soon as I disabled Google updater from starting up automatically, and removed the Google bar from Firefox 2, I’ve had no more crashes when waking up my windows MBP (and Firefox crashes are done with also). However, I’m still having the other problems: 1. screen flicker 2. keyboard backlight flickers on/off 3. mouse movement can get very jerky, and it often does 4. music in iTunes stutters badly All these coincide with CPU usage spikes. When I monitor CPU usage, I notice IR is refreshing often and these issues coincide with the refresh although they do not happen every cycle. Other than that, fantastic tool. MBP 15” 2.33 Ghz, 2 GB, 120 GB HD, 256 MB ATI X1600 Are you using anything else that is CPU intensive at the same time? Are you using any other utility that talks to the SMC such as MacBook Tray tools? Are the CPU spikes 15 seconds apart? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteStar Posted December 17, 2006 Author Share Posted December 17, 2006 (edited) Thanks for the reply Beyaal. I appreciate everything you've done. I am not familiar enough with mac hardware to say if anything is competing for the SMC. My experience has been strictly on non-apple x86 based machines (the old fashioned BIOS). I don't have Macbook tray tools installed. I do have the "brightness" icon in the systray which was part of the Apple bootcamp drivers install and I did uninstall the apple keyboard drivers as per your instructions. I do often run very CPU intensive programs - I'm a databse developer so for example, I often have Oracle and Sybase runnig simultaneously along with some Java IDE like ecilpse running at once. But before I moved to the Macbook pro, I never experienced these issues. Because of my unfamiliarity with the Mac hardware, I am asking these questions. The sleep mode crash issue is now resolved and you answered the mouse issue in the other post (bad apple driver). As for the other issues: the CPU spikes seem to be somewhere between 5 and 20 secs apart which seems to rule out input remapper. As far as IR is concerned, in the windows task manager, I see 3 processes running (2 under SYSTEM, 1 under my user id) and only one of the processes peaks at 5% CPU but at less than 15 second intervals. The music stutter is totally random. Sometimes twice in 5 seconds other times once in a minute. The keyboard backlight flicker happens may be once every 15 minutes. btw, can you suggest a web site where I can learn the details of SMC? Thanks very much. Edited December 17, 2006 by WhiteStar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beliyaal Posted December 17, 2006 Share Posted December 17, 2006 (edited) If you havn't installed anything it's probably only input remapper speaking to the SMC. The SMC is the controller hardware in the Mac that controls fans, keyboard backlight and other stuff. Could you try quitting the apple brightness app and see if the problems stop. If they don't. Quit the input remapper taskbar icon and stop the "Input Remapper" service and see if the problems are still there. If Input Remapper is the problem I have some idees what could be causing it. Edit: The backlight and keyboard flicker could be explained if you have enabled autodimming and it fails to read the light sensors. Do you have these features enabled when you see the flicker? Edited December 17, 2006 by Beliyaal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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