The safest way to shut down a Mac which is stuck at the screensaver

high sierrascreensavershutdown

I use a MacBook Pro for work. According to my workplace's policy, when I leave my desk, I lock the screen. There's a bug in MacOS High Sierra where sometimes when I come back and unlock the screen, the screensaver is showing and can't be dismissed. The laptop is therefore unusable.

The only way I have found of getting back into my mac is to hold the power button down until the laptop shuts down. But this isn't a safe shutdown; if I have any Parallels VMs running they are usually corrupted and I have to restore them from backups.

Is there a safer way shut down, or otherwise get back into, my Mac? If so, what is it?

Best Answer

A couple potential ideas:

1. Try to avoid the Screen Saver Bug: Turn off the screen saver (set it to “Never”) and just adjust the Energy Saver to turn the screen off to prevent burn-in. You can still lock the screen with ⌃⌘Q

2. Alternate Login Methods: If allowed, turn on Screen Sharing and/or Remote Login in System Preferences » Sharing and see if you can login with your phone using ssh or vnc (I recommend Prompt and Screens, respectively).

3. Sleep Instead Of Lock: Enable a “Hot Corner” to put the Mac to sleep instead of just locking it with the screen saver. Not as convenient as just locking it and walking away, as it will take a little longer to wake from sleep, but if it doesn't trigger the bug, it would be worth it, perhaps?

Related Solutions

Shell or Applescript to delay shutdown

Why not just change your users' behavior on the shutdown process to make this a lot simpler (with minimal effort on scripting/programming the shutdown hook)?

Tell the users not to use the standard shutdown process (from the menu or through the keyboard shortcut) and instead use your backup AppleScript that's transformed into an app called something like SafeShutdown.app

Within the SafeShutdown app script, do the backup and then end it with a

tell application "Finder"
    shut down
end tell

or with this (will prompt for password)

do shell script "sudo shutdown -h now" with administrator privileges

or with a

tell application "System Events"
    shut down
end tell

MacOS – Toggling screensaver password with script

The same thing happens to me in 10.9. I also tried changing require password to wake of security preferences and putting displays to sleep instead of starting a screen saver:

tell application "System Events"
    set require password to wake of security preferences to true
    --start screen saver "Random"
    do shell script "pmset displaysleepnow"
    delay 5
    set require password to wake of security preferences to false
end tell

Neither of them helped though.

You might log out to the fast user switching screen instead of locking the screen though:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell or Applescript to delay shutdown

MacOS – Toggling screensaver password with script

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