2007 Macbook shows black screen and cursor when woken from sleep. What should I do?

Solution 1:

I've had this happen too. Solutions that occasionally work:

  • Close the lid, wait for the 'sleeping' light pulses from the front of the laptop, then reopen and try again.
  • Type my password (I have password protected sleep/screensaver) and hit enter blind.
  • Wait a few minutes
  • Sleep the computer by hitting the power button once (not holding it down), then waking it up.
  • Swearing profusely

Solutions that almost always work:

  • Force rebooting.

Solution 2:

Yeah, I've had this issue very occasionally on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, I've never found a reliable solution to it. Normally I simply killed the machine and rebooted. I've always suspects it's simply an issue of the hardware/software not syncing up quite right on wake, which is something that can and does frequently happen on all manner of Mac and PC hardware.

Solution 3:

I have a MacBook with Snow Leopard and sometimes this is happening to me too.
Usually I just close the lid again, wait a minute or such for the light to begin to pulse, open the lid again and then everything works normally.