Macbook freezing on wake up

Question

I've had my first macbook pro for about 4 months now and for the past month or two, whenever I have woken it up after it has been asleep for 6+ hours it has made the same noise it does when turning it on and I get the spinning beachball and can't enter my password for about 20-40 seconds. It's really really annoying and I have no idea how to fix this. Can anybody help?

Answer 1

With the "Power Nap" feature enabled, the computer enters a so-called standby mode after it has been in sleep on battery power for more than a certain time (one hour, by default.) In that mode, the contents of memory are saved to a file, and then the power is turned off. When the computer wakes up, the contents of memory are restored from the file. As a result, waking from sleep takes longer than it otherwise would. The benefit is that sleep can be prolonged indefinitely without draining the battery or having to reboot.
You have three choices. One is to do nothing. Use the machine as designed. That's what I recommend.
The second choice is to disable Power Nap in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences. Uncheck the box marked Enable Power Nap... in each of the tabs. You won't get the wake delay anymore, but you won't get any of the features of Power Nap either. See this page for details:
OS X Mountain Lion: About Power Nap
The third choice is to increase the delay before standby mode is triggered, or to disable standby mode completely. This is an unsupported option and you're on your own as to the consequences. If you choose to go this route, proceed as below. These instructions are for advanced users only. You are tinkering with the hardware configuration at a low level, with the possibility of doing damage from which it may not be easy to recover.
Back up all data.
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out these instructions.
Drag across the line below to select it, then copy it to the Clipboard (command-C):
sudo pmset –a standbydelay
Don't copy the blank space at the end of the line.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste (command-V) into the Terminal window. Press the space bar, then type the delay you want, in seconds. For example, if you want to change the standby delay from the default one hour to eight hours, enter 28800. Don't put commas or other punctuation marks in the number. To disable standby, enter 0 (zero.)
When the command is complete, press return. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. After running it, quit Terminal. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.