Mac laptop screen going to sleep and changing desktop background

last weekend my daughter called to say that her Macbook was acting strange. On Friday night she saw the battery icon said 25%, so she shut the system down. The next morning she plugged it in and booted. It took a while and the desktop background had changed to something grey. Also, the screen would blank out after 30 seconds to a minute. If she hit the space bar it would show and then go black after the 30 to 60 second time period. I had her shutdown and boot to her external drive where she had a month old image of her system. It took a minute or two to boot (it always seems like a long time when you are on the phone). It came up as her normal system and background. She left it for over an hour and it did not black out or go to sleep. We were planning on doing a restore the next day, but when she did a normal boot later that day from the internal hard drive, it came up with her normal background and the screen stayed active. She had not tried to set any settings. Is there something that a low battery would do to change the energy settings? We were going to explore the settings when the system magically worked as normal. It seems strange that a boot to the external drive would restore settings so that the system worked normally.

Energy Saver and third party USB often don't go well hand in hand. I would though contact OWC and let them know you are having this problem, since they have a good track record of supporting the Mac platform. In the meantime, use Screen Saver instead of Energy Saver.
And always keep your data backed up at least twice as my FAQ explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

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