The Site With the Lamp

August 7, 2008

The other day I ran into a problem where the screen on the macbook suddenly appeared to power down. It was just black. It stayed the same even after a restart. It appears as if the computer is in sleep mode, but In actual fact the screen is live - but the back light is switched off. It's as if the energy saver has kicked into action.

I tried a lot of different remedies posted in different forums, ranging from changing the sleep mode to resetting the SMC and RAM. None of it seemed to work. Firmware updates cannot be applied since the macbook already had the latest version of the firmware. The obvious next step is to roll back the firmware. This is where procrastination and being lazy really helped. I was playing around with the setting on the macbook over a vncviewer when I suddenly thought of switching off power saving.

It turns out that in order to solve the blank screen problem, all you need to do is to switch off the 'Reduce brightness of the built-in display when using this power source' and the 'Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before sleep'. And your LCD springs back to life.

Of course to do this, you need to have VNC. If you don't have VNC you can simply plug in an external monitor (but you need a special adapter for that because there isn't a VGA socket on the macbook).