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Ambient Light Sensor on 15" AlBook stopped working!

I

illumin8

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I'm not sure when this happened (sometime in the last few days) but the Ambient Light Sensor stopped working on my 15" AlBook. When I turn the lights off, my screen used to dim and the keyboard would light up. When I turned the lights back on, the keyboard would unlight and the screen would brighten. This no longer happens. I checked my preferences and both features are still enabled. I also tried shutting down my computer and restarting it just in case there was a daemon that had died or something.

OMG, as I was typing this, I held my hand over the grill on the left of the keyboard for a second and the screen brightened a little bit. I decided to try the "turn the lights off" thing again and it works. Has anyone seen this happen where the ALS system stops working for a few days and then just starts working again? Could it be dust getting in the grills on the left and right of the keyboard?
 
This has happened to me a few times, but only lasted for a few hours at most. In fact, it happened to me last night.
 
When this happens to me, I have found that closing the book to out it to sleep and opening it again, the sensor will work perfectly. I wonder if it just powers down or something. I'm guessing we'd need a firmware and not OS update to fix the problem then.
 
Originally posted by MattG
I would try resetting the PMU if you haven't already. This has fixed some quirky little problems like that on my own Powerbook.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449
Click to expand...
Thanks for the advice but I don't think I need to do anything that drastic yet. The fact that others in this forum have had the same problem seems to indicate to me that it must be either a Panther bug or a Firmware bug that will probably be fixed at some point.

Stoid: Thanks for the confirmation that this happens occaionally to you too. Usually I found it starts working again as well if you put it to sleep again, but this time it happened, it was being really quirky and not even a shutdown or a restart would make it work.
 
The ALS semsers stopped working on my 17". Restarting, resetting the pram and even reinstalling Panther didnt fix it. I took it to an apple store and they sent it in for repair. 😡
 
Must be firmware...

This must be either a Firmware issue or an OS issue because it seems to happen to everyone that has either a 15" or 17" that supports it.

Just to get a data point or two, is everybody here running Panther? I'm running 10.3.1 from a clean install on mine.
 
It happened again last night 🙁 I'm running 10.3.1, from a cleans install of 10.2.7, upgraded to 10.2.8, then archive and install to 10.3, then upgraded to 10.3.1. This didn't start happening until the 10.3.1 upgrade. I have yet to try resetting the PRAM.
 
Ok, so mine was doing the same thing and I found that putting it to sleep fixed the problem. NOW...........

This morning I'm using the thing and it was a bit dark so I hit F10 to turn the backlight up (I thought I had turned it down). When I hit F8, F9 or F10, I don't even get the screen to tell me the backlight function isn't available. I also checked under System Prefs and I can't even turn the backlight function on or off and I also can't turn the display to automatically change with light conditions. Basically, I now have the basic 15" Powerbook instead the one I bought!!

So I've done a firmware reset and also the PMU reset and neither helped. AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jake
 
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