Energy Saver Preferences Not Saved in 10.8.2

Reading Time: < 1 minutes
The saver that refuses to save.
The saver that refuses to save.

Problem

In the Energy Saver preference pane of System Configuration in OS X 10.8.2, any changes made are lost upon restart.

Discussion

Here is an abridged list of things I tried that did not solve the problem:

  • Disk Utility repair permissions function
  • Various command line repair permissions functions on ~/Library and sub folders
  • Deleting com.apple.systempreferences.plist and many other .plist files
  • Setting and reconfiguring with pmset on the command line
  • Performing an SMC reset
  • Performing a PRAM reset

I searched through a bunch of forum posts, Apple articles and blog posts to no avail.

What I found was that this file

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

was being modified whenever I changed the values in Energy Saver Preferences, and for some reason it was getting overwritten or reset whenever I rebooted.

Solution (Workaround)

To prevent this, I locked (made immutable) the file with this command:

sudo chflags uchg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

And now the Energy Saver Preferences survive a reboot.  If I need to change them again, I’ll have to manually unlock the file, make the changes, and then lock it again, so this is just a workaround until I find out what is causing the problem in the first place. If you have any ideas, let me know.

 

5 thoughts on “Energy Saver Preferences Not Saved in 10.8.2

  1. This has not been fixed in 10.3. I manage over 50 computers at a community college and it is most annoying! Would love to find a solution to this.

  2. When I ended up doing a clean install of 10.8.3 for unrelated reasons, this problem magically disappeared, so I never did find out the root cause on my rMBP. I wonder if a clean install on one of your 50 machines would solve the problem, and then you could add the standard software changes one at a time to see what breaks it.

Comment