I typically put the machine to sleep each evening before retiring and, after checking the mail and news of a morning, before lurching off to the workplace. I note that with increasing frequency the computer restarts rather than reawkening, whether I begin by tickling the mouse or tapping a key—it seems to me that this has happened at least four times in the past seven days: I will begin keeping a log.

This would be vexing if the unit did not boot up so briskly (about thirty seconds vs. closer to three minutes for Old Blue, its predecessor), and it certainly serves as incentive not to leave works in progress unsaved overnight. At that, I appear thus far to have been lucky, given disturbing reports of brother iMacs lapsing into persistent vegetative states during sleep, reviving only after (figuratively) violent shaking or not at all. Clearly the phenomenon bears continued scrutiny and further research.

cordially,

The computer had taken to restarting whenever it was nudged after having been put to sleep for more than a couple of hours. I noticed that each time it came back to life it did so with about a dozen open Finder windows—the same dozen, identically arrayed, which I closed en masse first thing before proceeding. Of course, one of the things the Mac OS does during a proper shutdown is to record the desktop state, so it belatedly occurred to me that whatever irregularity was causing the computer to swoon while unattended might be persisting, just like the undesired open windows, through each of these spontaneous startups. I accordingly conducted a full shutdown, whistled the first thirty seconds of the aria from "The Marriage of Not-Jenna Bush," powered up again, and...we're golden again for the past two days.

cordially,