Screen Goes Black after a few minutes

When is your screen saver set to activate (minutes) in System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver ?
When is your screen set to dim (minutes) in System Preferences/Energy Saver ?
Do you have 'hot corners' set to activate one of both of these in System Preferences/Expose & Spaces ?

Since I still get the "We haven't heard of anyone else having this problem" from the Apple Store and AppleCare, everyone don't forget to fill out a bug report so Apple has an "official" record.

http://www.apple.com/feedback

File under - bug.

Same problem. MBP 2.2 10.4.11 Not system related, yes MBP related.

Apple in the Netherlands also acts like we are the only ones experiencing this problem.. ;-(

Help. We can take it back in under warranty, but that can take a long time they say.

I find it strange there is no acknowledgment of a problem by Apple, which would save all of us a lot of time and aggravation.

How common is this problem?

And will of course now report as Flycadet rightly suggests. ( http://www.apple.com/feedback)

🙂
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306835

*Addresses an issue in which the backlight could turn off before Energy Saver's backlight setting.*

It is clear, for once.

*Now, he first letter missing is not resolved ..*

This thread :

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1356337&tstart=0&start=45

Message was edited by: hotplug

I am experiencing this same issue on my 15" MBP 2.2 running Leopard.

It is really annoying.

No hot corners, display is set to sleep in 30 minutes and the computer is set to sleep in 1hr. The screen goes black in about 3 minutes. The sleep light is not on during this. When you touch a key or the trackpad the screen comes back on quickly.

Anyone have a clue what is going on here?

Did you have your MBP running Tiger and did this issue only occur after you updated to Leopard. The OP was posting about my new 15" 2.4 Hz MBP which was upgraded to Leopard right away so I do not know how it would have behaved with OS 10.4. My screen is going black after only about 30 sec. The sleep light does not come on when this happens and the screen comes back on instantly when a key is touched. Does anyone know if this is a Leopard issue or a hardware/component problem. I have reset the PRAM and the SMC to no effect.

I set the energy saver so that the screen will "never" sleep, and so far the screen stayed on for about 10 minutes before I touched to computer. I guess I will leave it this way for now. Maybe there is some disconnect between the control of the LED backlight and the screen sleep setting? I have only had this MBP since Tuesday so I think that I will call AppleCare and see what they say. Hopefully this will be a simple fix in Leopard.

I took my MBP to the Genius Bar at the Apple store and the tech said that he had never seen this happen before. Since I only had the MBP for three days, they gave me a new one. I restored the HD from my Time Machine back-up, which went perfectly, however the new machine exhibits the same problem. This must be a Leopard issue. Please be sure that you report this problem to Apple. I guess for the time being I will set the display to never sleep and the computer to sleep after 20 min and see if this provides a work around for now.

I am also experiencing this problem on my MacBook Pro (Late 2007; Santa Rosa). I did a clean install from Tiger to Leopard and it certainly seems like a Leopard specific problem. This never occurred on Tiger.

I also thought it might be the screen saver setting in Front Row, but it still goes black after I disabled that setting.

Ahhh.... Here are my people!

I too am having the same issue. Called AppleCare twice with no luck. Went to the Genius Bar today, again with no luck. I left with a homework assignment of "Reinstalling Leopard using the 'Archive & Install option."

Again, no luck.

I have tried...
-Reset the SMC
-Reset the PRAM
-Repair Permissions
-Delete the HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration folder
-Reinstalled Leopard Twice

My Settings...
-Screen Saver = Never
-Energy Star, display sleep = After 10 minutes.
-Energy Star, computer sleep = After 45 minutes.
-Energy Star, Options, "Automatically reduce brightness before going to sleep" = UNchecked.

After 4 minutes on AC power (2 on battery) the screen goes dark, the little blue light in the latch button does NOT light up. If I do nothing, after 10 minutes, the light will come on steady (apple, for display is asleep,) and after 45 minutes, the light will throb as the computer goes to sleep.

If I check the "Reduce brightness before going to sleep" button, the screen will dim after 4 minutes, at 10 minutes, the screen will darken and the blue light will be steady. In other words, everything works like it should. Once this box is unchecked, voila! There is the bug.

I have also tried all of the above. I spent 3 hours on the phone to Apple care with no solution!! Two installs later and still no success. I purchased the laptop 1 week prior to upgrading to Leopard and I can say it didn't have the bug using Tiger. Tiger did have a screen dimming bug (only went to about half brightness when all power options were set to avoid this) with the MBP, but that had a number of workarounds (including unplugging the power cable and plugging it in again....all fixed until a restart). I experienced the same issue on my 1st generation MBP....it is a very common bug in Tiger. There are no workarounds for the Leopard bug that I'm aware of. I hope they fix this soon....its very annoying. For now I've set the reduce brightness option to on so at least I can still see whats on the screen after 3-minutes on not touching the mouse.

I've also occasionally experienced a weird trend where sometimes the first key entered doesn't go on the screen. This happened in Tiger and Leopard, so isn't an OS bug. I've read a variety of posts where people have experienced the same thing. Would be keen to hear if others are having a similar problem. The issue is it isn't reproducible!! It certainly didn't happen to my first generation MBP.

I am experiencing this as well. MBP 2.4, Leopard. Never experienced this in Tiger.

When "Automatically reduce display the brightness of the display before display sleep" is enabled, the screen dims after 2 minutes or so and the display sleeps after 5 minutes (I set it this way). When the setting is disabled the display dims to the lowest brightness setting after exactly 1 minute. The backlight is off but there is still a faint display on the screen.

Identical issue. The machine is less than two weeks old. It came with Tiger installed and a Leopard DVD, which I installed straight away, so I have no idea if Tiger would have exhibited the same behaviour.

And I agree; it's most annoying.

Also having this problem on a two-month-old 2.2 GHz Macbook Pro on Leopard. No combination of reboots or energy saver settings (including command-line pmset) seems to be able to fix it. The system was running fine before installing Leopard.

To be very specific, the problem I am experiencing is that the screen backlight switches off after a minute or two of being left unattended. The screen is still on, but the backlight is completely off.