The Site With the Lamp

August 6, 2008

Sure windows sucks but apple seems to suck even more. The back-light on the Macbook LCD shutting down (gives the impression that the computer is asleep) will not go away. There are thousands of 'me too' posts on the web out there. Apple doesn't seem to be able to or want to come up with a solution. There are several solutions proposed by other users. Some of them seem to have worked for some but not for others.

The most obvious thing to do whenever there is a problem with a macbook or a macbook pro is to reset the PRAM (hold down Comman - Option - P - R while rebooting). That didn't solve it. The next is to try to reset the SMC (Unplug power, take out battery, hold down power button for 5seconds , start up again) is not a solution either.

One proposed solution is to switch off the 'safe sleep' mode. This is done by deleting the /private/var/vm/sleepimage file and the /system/library/extensions.mkext file along with the execution of these two commands:

That unfortunately didn't do anygood either. So it was time to look at suggestions such as updating the firmware and SMC unfortunately both are upto date. The next option is to download the latest OS X update. That happens to be a security update but Apple is notorious more so than Windows when it comes to fessing up about bugs in their software. It's quite possible that their Security updates contain bug fixes to other issues and other updates patch the system to close up security holes. After downloading a 140Mb file over a slow dialog broadband connection, I can tell you that the issue is still there.