Fixing my slow sleep problem

Question

I have been having problems with my MacBook taking a fairly long time before going to sleep. In attempting to fix the problem I have tried repairing permissions, resetting PRAM, Safe Boot mode, cleaning the system with MacJanitor, etc. In some cases the system seem to work better, but eventually the slow sleep problem reappeared.
I did further searching and found references to checking what the system was doing before going to sleep using the System Console. I tried this and found a variety of error messages being logged that didn't seem normal. With further investigation I found a number of problems related to remnants of old programs still affecting my system when they should have been removed some time ago.
I started to track down and remove items manually such as no longer used prefpanes. I found items in the Launch Agents and Launch Daemons directories that shouldn't have been there. I even found an old kernel extension (SideTrack.kext) that was somehow transferred from my old Powerbook to my new MacBook. There were also .plist items hanging around that weren't needed - so I removed them too.
After using the Console to identify problems in my system and then track down and remove all the old program remnants, my MacBook seems to be its old self again. It goes to sleep very quickly and the overall performance of the system seems improved. So, if you're having sleep issues or other problems I'd suggest having a look at the System Console to help identify the problems.

Answer 1

The sleep time before the fix was in the 20-30 sec. range. The sleep time after getting things fixed is about 1-2 sec. or so.