Stop your MacBook/Pro from waking up in your bag

Shortly after I got my MacBook Pro, I started running into situations where the machine was waking up in my bag on the way to wherever I was going and overheating. This is a problem, obviously, because shutting down is simply not an option--it's too inconvenient.

After doing some research and implementing some of the things I found, I am happy to say that I am no longer experiencing any issues.

Here are some simple suggestions to try:

1. Unplug everything before your put Mac to sleep. As you may or may not know, plugging in or unplugging ANYTHING on your MacBook will wake the computer.
2. Disable "Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer." If you have any kind of bluetooth mouse or other peripheral in your bag, one small bump can wake your Mac from sleep mode. To do this, go into your System Preferences, then Bluetooth, then click the Advanced button, and uncheck "Allow Bluetooth..."
   

If you still experience problems, you can change the settings so that putting your Mac to sleep will actually put it in hibernate mode. Hibernate mode is like Sleep, only instead of keeping your state in memory (which uses battery life), it writes your state to the hard drive (which uses no battery life). This is kind of a compromise between sleep and shut down. It takes a little longer to come back when you wake it up, but you don't have to close any applications or lose any work.

The command-line trick to this is the following:

• Open up a terminal window (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
• Check to see what sleep setting you are using. Type: pmset -g | grep hibernatemode
• If you are using setting 3, which should be the default, you can change to setting 1 which is hibernate only by typing: sudo pmset -a hibernate mode 1
• Of course, if you ever want to switch back to the default, just set it back to 3
  

The GUI trick to this is the following (this way is nicer):

• Download SmartSleep, and follow the installation instructions
• Run the application, and choose "hibernate only" from the drop-down list
  

Finally, if you STILL have problems, you might want to try resetting the memory and the controller chip. Disclaimer: I have no idea if this will actually work, but this is a set of instructions provided by AppleCare to someone having this issue who doesn't have Bluetooth even enabled:

1. Turn off your Mac.
2. Remove the battery and unplug the power cord.
3. Press down the power button and leave it pressed for 15 seconds.
4. Put the battery back in, then plug in the power cord.
   
5. Turn on your Mac while pressing the following button combination: command+option+P+R.
6. Keep the buttons pressed until the Mac restarts three times.
   

If you've tried all of the above and are still having problems, good luck! At that point, I would consider the possibility that you have a lemon.