MacBook Pro :: Unibody With 10.6.2 Forgets To Auto - Dim Its Display After About Day
Jan 26, 2010
After about a day of use my Unibody MBP 13" running 10.6.2 forgets how to auto-dim its display. The "automatically adjust brightness" checkbox is still checked, but the display doesn't change brightness even if I put my thumb over the sensor. Checking & unchecking the box makes no difference. Trashing ~ System Preferences .plist makes no difference.
If I switch to another user that user still has auto-dimming working OK. If I log out and in again auto-dim works again for a day or two. So it seems like software and not hardware. I've also reset the SMC, no difference.
- have the same problem?
- know what bit of software handles auto-dim:- is there a process I can quit and relaunch?
- useful suggestions eg about .plist trashing?
I have a rev. A MBA and it does two odd things. If I set the display to full brightness, then power down and back up, the display doesn't return to full brightness. I have to go into the display preferences pane and move the slider a fraction of an inch to return to full brightness. The "adjust brightness for ambient light" and "reduce brightness on this power source" are disabled, so that isn't it. Also, the MBA forgets the brightness setting for the keyboard when it is powered off and then on again. As best I can determine the keyboard brightness is set to a random level at power up. I've used MacBook Pros for years, so I don't think it's anything I'm doing.
I am setting up a new 17 inch macbook pro for a friend. He uses a 24 inch LCD external monitor so we purchased the mini display port to dvi adapter (as opposed to the mini display port to dual link dvi adapter for 30 inch monitors). However, I am at home setting up his computer using my external monitor which is the 30 inch dell monitor. For some reason, the maximum resolution I can get is 1280x800 on the external 30 inch monitor. I figured I should at least be able to get 1920x1200 resolution, right?? Does anyone know what may be going on here. I know you're able to switch between video cards on the unibody macbook pros, how do I do that as well?
I had returned the unibody Macbook I bought last December primarily due to the low quality screen. I'm wondering if anyone has comparison photos between the two (especially at different viewing angles), as I'm seriously considering purchasing the 13" again.
So, I know theres a few threads about how some people's displays are slightly bent on the sides.
I'm in the exact same situation...sort of.
While mine is also slightly askew on the sides, I've decided not to bother with that, since just about every single unit I've come across is shaped more or less the same way. However, something I noticed the other day was that my display indeed also bent, however it was bent in the front!
Basically, imagine the computer in a closed position, and that you're looking at it from the front. Now essentially if you follow the area where the rubber gasket meets the unibody, it starts out aligned, then almost immediately, for lack of better words, it takes off from the ground. The biggest telltale sign is that you can clearly see light coming through the space it creates.
Since its not off by a huge amount, I figured Apple probably won't care, but since its rather annoying knowing its there, I decided to try and fix it myself. However I haven't had much luck, and I think I might have made it a little worse!
So far I've tried: -stacking some books(only about 2, light textbooks) -and flipping the computer upside down and leaving it like that for a few hours(nothing on top).
Any other recommendations?
I've attached a picture kinda showing where its at. I couldn't find a full frontal picture of the computer, so I just took a side view one off of Apple's site, and marked the approximate area where the bend occurs.
I have a macbook with leopard osx and use it frequently for presentations and so on. I have connected it to several monitors and projectors a hundred times and it has worked fine since last night.
Last night, I have connected my mac to a monitor with vga cable but it did not detect it and instead a constantly flickering blue screen came up and never went. I am sure the cables are fine.
I am trying to anodize my alluminum Macbook unibody that I just got and I have begun disassembling it. In order to anodize or electroplate the aluminum, it must be stripped down to pure metal. No cable, wires, boards, nothing. THe bottom half of the computer with the motherboard and keyboard I have succesfully gutted. The top half, however, I am having no such luck with. I need to remove the hinge/lcd/display assembly from the aluminum back cover. I have searched everywhere online and can find nothing. Ifixit does not go that far. The youtube video by this other company shows the Macbook Pro display and hinge magically come off, but they do not share how [URL].
I bought Apple Cinema Display and a MBP Unibody. I was told that the lid of the MBP must be closed from boot-up so that the display will be transferred to ACD. I did this, I found out that after a while, even with no high cpu load or usage... it become very hot and fan goes up.
The heat goes away when I open the lid... I tried putting a cooler fan below the MBP.
Just received my new uMBP 17'' with antiglare/matte display. It works like a charm an is definitely and upgrade from my old MBP.
But after using it for 6 hours I discovered that the display itself is not centered!! How can this happen?". I googled/MRoogled the problem and it turns out its not that uncommon on the 17'' with antiglare display:
For some odd reason, I have been experiencing some creaking when I move the display of my Unibody 15.5" Macbook Pro. At all. It just is very annoying, as it has a distinct plastiky sound to it, and it was not there to begin with. I don't know if this matters, but I have a Speck clear case that I used, but then I took it off because it seemed to be twisting the display a bit. Is this creaking a known issue with the Unibodies, or is it just because of the Speck case? I have never dropped my computer, and it has never been mistreated. It just leads its life on my desk or in my laptop bag.
I have a unibody Macbook pro and an Apple 24" display. This work fine but I also have a Samsung 22" display that I like to hook to my setup (never enough desktop space).
Well my unibody macbook display decided to screw up last night, it was working fine last night no problem. Connected to a external monitor. I fell asleep last night with front row left on, obviously it went to sleep and then I woke up and the screen was black. Now the LED lights are working, my external display is also working. The display settings recognize a screen being present (when I click detect displays and gather windows - 2 windows appear). Ive reset PRAM, SMC, reseated the RAM, control+shift+eject (which just made the screen flicker a little after turning it back on) and Im out of ideas. Its out of warranty and about about 18months old.
I just got a Early 2011 Macbook Pro 15" i7 that has a broken scissor for the "x" key (I still have the black "x" key itself. Would the scissors from an late 2007 Macbook Pro 15" be compatible (I've got an old dead keyboard for it that had coffee spilled on it)?
My computer (newer imac, last gen) has an issue with remembering passwords. It'll forget them in the middle of me using the internet. Usually it forgets what my Gmail password is (using the gmail notifier in the top right corner), it forgets my passwords on sites like this (every week or so) and it forgets certain things i do in certain programs (itll reset everything like i've never used it before).
I have two external drives which I do not wish Spotlight to index. I add both drives to the privacy list in the system preference panel, but every time I reboot (usually for a system update), Spotlight ties up my computer for several hours indexing these two drives again!
How do I convince Spotlight to honour the privacy settings on a clean reboot?
Is this some sort of timing issue where the external drives may not be ready when Spotlight starts, so it removes them from the list, and later when they are ready Spotlight notices them and processes them?
I have a problem with firewall under 10.6.5 under both of my macs (MBPRo and MacMini). The system firewall forgets the settings that allow connetction for iTunes, World of Warcraft Launcher, Blizzard Downloader, DropBox app. I have to mention that settings are set for this apps in system preferences / firewall.
I use PhotoShop every day and since Leopard I have been using Spaces which saves me a tremendous amount of time. My problem is that PhotoShop does not "see" Spaces at all and it turns the normal everyday pain of working with PhotoShop into something truly excruciating. What I am looking for here are workarounds if anyone has them. My main issue is that PhotoShop forgets the positions and even the existence of almost all palettes, toolbars, etc. if you switch into a different "space." Even though the various palettes are checked as visible, they do not show as such until you uncheck them and then re-check them in the menus. This means about 20 clicks minimum to get the workspace back to where it was when you (foolishly) decided to switch spaces.
I have discovered of course that you can "save the workspace environment" (something I have never had to do before and have absolutely no use for), but PShop puts your saved workspace at the very bottom of a menu containing over 23 items! If you have twenty documents open, the menu then has 43 items, etc. The other alternative is to use the "default" workspace (paradoxically at the *top* of that same menu), and switch to that each time you come back to the program. But this is also a couple of clicks that I don't need, and it doesn't work for me anyway as my usual "workspace" is the default one with only a couple of adjustments (three or four more clicks each time). so even to use the default workspace, I have this tedious four or five click routine to perform every time I switch back to the program. So while we are waiting for Adobe to produce some software with some sort of minimal functionality. Does anyone else have any ideas how I can use Spaces with PShop and have less than five or so wasted clicks every time I want to use the stupid thing?
Ive read tons of threads about system prefs not remembering things and i am still yet to find something that fixes this problem. When i restart, or shut down and reboot, once i enter my password system prefs wont remember a single thing. not my default browser, not the size of my dock or my background. it takes all the songs out of my itunes and forgets all the passwords to my accounts online. it removes icons from my dock for example i added firefox to the computer and when i restart firefox is in the app folder but the icon wont stay on the dock. this is driving me insane. ive repaired permissions countless times.
I am trying to recovery a file created in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. The file was lost after a power outage. In an attempt to recover the file, my first thought was to check for the file in the Microsoft AutoRecovery 2008 folder within my hardrive. However, the folder only contains a total of four files! Why? If my Microsoft Word is set up to auto save a document every 10 minutes...then how is it possible the folder could only contain 4 files? I am at a loss of how else to recover this file. I am currently attempting to do so with a free trial of Data Recovery Software to see if the file I lost even still exists, with no success so far.
I've seen this problem documented elsewhere, but none of the "solutions" seem to work.
I have two-step verification enabled on my Gmail account. I generate a unique application password for Apple Mail, which I enter into the password field in the Mail application.
Inexplicably, anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 week later, when I attempt to send an e-mail I will be prompted that the password is "wrong." It isn't, because I HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING. The only way I can get the message to go away is to revoke and then re-generate another unique password.
Interestingly, I can receive e-mails into the account with no problem, but it seems the sending part is where Mail gets wonky. I have tried:
-Removing the e-mail account entirely from Mail and setting it up from scratch
-Deleting all traces of the old password from my Mac, including from Keychain Access (did this combined with the above).
I am getting tired of this and am two steps from ditching Mail for a more functional e-mail client.
Attached you'll see two images. The first, 'Applications Folder', is how I want my Applications Folder to look whenever I access it directly (i.e. from the Go menu in the Finder Menu Bar, or from an alias or from the Dock by right-clicking, Open "Applications").
Finder used to remember this appearance perfectly. I can't remember exactly when this started, but now whenever Finder is restarted (killall Finder or a reboot) it completely forgets the settings for the Applications folder and opens it as shown in the second image, 'Finder Bug'. That's the far right of the screen, by the way. Not only does it forget the size and position of the folder's window, it also resets the grid spacing to the default value.
It only does it for this folder...I've already tried removing the .DS_Store file many times, so it's not an issue with that file. I've also run clean-up scripts and repaired permissions. It's bugs like this that still make me long for Tiger.
I just bought a new MacBook Pro and used Migration Assistant to move my old MacBook files to the new machine. Ever since the file migration, my brand new iPod Touch is having a lot of problems connecting to iTunes. Here's the deal: When connected by USB to the new MBP, the iPod charges fine, but is not recognized by iTunes (does not show up at all). After mucking around a bit (unplugging/plugging in, deleting iTunes plists, and repairing disk permissions) I decided to reinstall iTunes. I followed Apple's directions to completely remove iTunes and after reinstalling iTunes the iPod was detected and all was working great again...until I shut down and restarted my computer and the iPod was no longer recognized.
I proceeded to uninstall/reinstall iTunes again. It worked!...until I restarted my computer and iTunes would not recognize the iPod again. Interestingly, each time that I followed Apple's directions to completely remove iTunes, I could not find iTunesHelper running in either Activity Monitor or present in the start-up items of System Preferences as the Apple KB suggested it should be. I should also mention that the new iPod Touch has no problems being detected by iTunes on my old MacBook (the source hard drive for the file migration). This is baffling to say the least. I'm getting ready to forget Migration Assistant, nuke my new MBP's user account and start from scratch.
I have recently started using a Time Capsule with an external hard drive attached. I have moved my music and video to the external hard drive to free up space on my MacBook Pro hard drive. I have set up iTunes to play from the external hard drive (which works fine), however, although I have changed the location of the iTune media folder in Preferences it keeps reverting to the iTunes media folder on my Mac's hard drive.
In a previous contact software program I have used for years, the first letter of names, streets, and cities, were automatically capitalized as I typed them in. Unfortunately, that software does not work under Lion and the developer is out of business. Because of that, I am trying to convert to Address Book. I can't find the ability to have that same thing happen in Address Book. Is there something I can turn on in Preferences or some other obscure window? My old contact software also automatically filled in cities, names, or states that I previously entered. Great time saver but doesn't seem to exist in Address Book.
I don't know if this is properly autofill or autocomplete - the two overlap too much anyway so I'm not wasting brain cells trying to come up with a distinction that makes sense to non-engineers. ANYWAY. Here's the point.
I'm on my bank website. My login is xtnjohnson -- just like here. Only I mistyped it once, so in autofill/autocomplete (whichever it is), I get a little drop-down showing two options: xtnjohnson or xtnjohson.
I want to delete only the second option. I recall at sometime finding a very simple way that involved highlighting the offending entry and hitting either control-delete, shift-delete, command-delete, or function-delete, only I can't seem to get any of those combinations to work. And of course I can't find the thread anymore.
The solution did *not* involve dealing with the autofill preferences in *any* way -- I've seen that option and it doesn't help (a) because there's no quick way to find the website where the problem is occurring (my list is long), (b) even when I go through my list, I don't see my bank's url, (c) the place for entering my login appears to be in something like JavaScript, so I'm not sure it'd be tracked in one of those lists, and (d) I don't know that this is properly an "autofill" problem anyway.
My wife's macbook monitor is destroyed due to happy 2 year old. It won't be worthwhile to replace the monitor and it is not fixable without some expensive work being done on it, therefore I would like to use our TV as an external monitor and retire the macbook to being a mediia computer. I have connected it to the TV, and I see an empty desktop, as far as I can determine it looks like it is treating the TV as a secondary display - that the desktop is extended onto - so I cannot actually interact with the normal desktop. When I try to run things using keyboard shortcuts I hear some sounds of things starting, but I don't see anything on the TV. So what I need to do is to have some way to tell it to treat the secondary display as the primary display.
I have read in at least one place in the forum that "any unibody macbook pro can take up to 1TB hard drive". As someone who has upgraded Dells and Thinkpads in the past this would make sense, i.e. Any hdd with same dimensions, access method (SATA?) and same spin speed would be supported.
The reason I ask is that I called Apple UK to have a family member's late 2009 13" unibody upgraded at an Apple store. Apple UK do not undertake hardware work and they directed me to a central London office who do their official repairs, and they said if the max capacity of that model when originally produced was 500GB then anything bigger "might use too much electricity". Would not upgrade beyond 500. Offered me £300 for the old one in exchange for a new mbp. As far as I was aware the bulk of the power drawn was down to spin speed not platter density. Upgrading from 320 to 500 is hardly worth their fee so it looks like a home upgrade.
