Some Small Problems (brightness; icon alignment)

[Variant]

Hi, I'm still fairly new to the mac (iMac) and I had two questions that I was hoping you guys/gals could help me with.

1. After I turn on my Imac the display is set to the lowest brightness and I have to turn it up every time.

2. For some reason the icons in Finder align in to columns instead of three. It's really annoying to have to make the window bigger each time. Also, the icons are at the default size.

I searched and didn't find any answers to these questions, so sorry if its already been asked.

Thankyou in advance for the help.

 

[pashazade]

Hi, I'm still fairly new to the mac (iMac) and I had two questions that I was hoping you guys/gals could help me with.

1. After I turn on my Imac the display is set to the lowest brightness and I have to turn it up every time.

Not seen this before but it certainly isn't right. I would normally say trash your preferences file but I don't know which one handles this. It is probably 'com.apple.systempreferences.plist' but that will mean you lose ALL your preferences.

2. For some reason the icons in Finder align in to columns instead of three. It's really annoying to have to make the window bigger each time. Also, the icons are at the default size.

This is a known issue with Finder, it has trouble 'remembering' it's settings. John Siracuse of Arstechnica has discussed many of the finder bugs.

"I also see a lot of complaints about the how the non-browser features of the Finder interfere with pure file browsing. ("Why can't I force all my browser windows to use list view by default?") ..."

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/18

 

[mad jew]

1. After I turn on my Imac the display is set to the lowest brightness and I have to turn it up every time.

For this, I'd try resetting the PRAM. I've never heard of this before and the most likely cause is a corrupt Energy Saver setting IMO.

2. For some reason the icons in Finder align in to columns instead of three. It's really annoying to have to make the window bigger each time. Also, the icons are at the default size.

For this, I'd go to every spot you open new Finder windows from, open one, resize to make columns of three, close and reopen to reset their size. For me, this is just the Finder icon in the Dock but you may have a few other locations you want to resize too.

 

[samanthas]

"After I turn on my Imac the display is set to the lowest brightness and I have to turn it up every time."

That's been happening to me too. I'll try the setting PRAM thing.

 

[samanthas]

Well, I gave it a couple days and the brightness problem hasn't happened again yet. The resetting of the PRAM didn't work, so I went into System Preferences and disabled "automatically reduce brightness..." and I think that worked.

Maybe you should try that...

 

[calebjohnston]

My finder sucks at remembering settings too. I really hope the new finder in 10.5 fixes that.

 

[samanthas]

Er, well it happened again when I turned my computer on this morning. Anyone else have any advice? I'm hoping that it's not any hardware problem.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, well as yet I haven't discovered how to reset the SMU on an Intel iMac however I guess it can't hurt using the technique outlined for a later model G5 iMac. The worst that can happen is that... Well, nothing really. Only attempt this once between log in sessions though. If this method does in fact reset the SMU, then you won't want to do it twice.

Good luck. I really hope it's not another inherent Intel Mac problem.

 

[samanthas]

Well, I did what the link said and oh my god when I turned on my computer again the fan was going a mile a minutes! Sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I was freaking out like you wouldn't believe but then I shut it down and turned it back on and the fan noise went away (thank god!).

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, that's normal although it doesn't always happen. Sorry, I probably should have warned you about it.

I really hope this gets somewhere because I can't think of anything else to do software-side. I really hope it's not an Intel issue (which it is increasingly looking like).

 

[samanthas]

Well, I've shut it down and turned it on like 3 times now and the brightess was still up. Sometimes this happens though, so I'll have to just wait a few days to see if it dims at start up again.

Thanks for your help. Hopefully it works.

 

[samanthas]

Well, it happened again. It happened this morning after almost two weeks of it not happening. I don't understand why sometimes it does it and then other times it doesn't (2 weeks!). Argh. I thought it was fixed.

I send a report to Apple and I'm hoping that they (try) to fix it with the next Mac OS X update. Hopefully it's software related.