Screen dimming bug!!!

Hmm.... I never thought about the dimming. My MacBook Pro dims after a minute or so. I've looked around and DO have the "automatically reduce brightness..." checked, but sleep doesn't happen for 2 hours; I doubt the "reduce brightness" happens that far in advance of sleep. In fact, I'd almost swear that my mac laptops have always dimmed after a minute, even when I've turned off sleep (and I don't have screensaver set to come on) - with Tiger and before that. I've just tested my Mac Mini - it doesn't have the "automatically reduce..." choice in Energy Saver. So this may be a laptop thing.

Is yours a laptop?

Ah, well having read your bottom line (which doesn't appear during a message post window), you do have a laptop.

When you say your screen "goes dark after 60-90 seconds" you mean it dims, yes? Not that it goes completely black, just loses brightness. If that's so, yes, it's annoying that you can't turn that off. Most of the time it doesn't bother me, because it means I've walked away from the laptop or have turned my attention to something else, but, as you say, if you're watching a video or somesuch it's a pain to have to nudge the mouse every couple of minutes!

What I'm guessing you want, and what I want, is a way to set what time we want the display to sleep but to eliminate the dimming effect altogether. I've looked and looked through Energy Saver and I don't think there is one, unless someone knows how to muck about with Terminal and make it happen. However, there is a bit of a workaround: if you know you are going to watch a video or perform some activity for which you do not want the screen to dim or to sleep at all, go into System Preferences => Energy Saver, and, under the Sleep tab, set the slider markers for "Put the computer to sleep..." and "Put the display(s) to sleep..." all the way to the right to "Never." It will give you a little Alert on the window that warns you that this may shorten the life of your display, but you can either ignore that or simply put the settings back to whatever you'd like them to be when you're done with your video. It's not the solution we want--we want the display to sleep at some point but we just don't want it to happen after two minutes!--but it's all I've found that will stop the dimming effect when I don't want it there.

My laptop was doing the identical thing after upgrading to Leopard.

Here's what fixed mine:
1) Open System Preferences> Energy Saver
2) Select "Settings for:" Power Adapter (Pull-down menu).
3) Run both sliders to "Never".
4) Close System Preferences.
5) Repeat steps 1 though 3, except run the sliders back to what you wanted.
6) Close System Preferences.

Hope this works for you too!

OK, I have read this thread because my son with his new Leopard Intel laptop needed to get the screen dimming after 2 minutes (or whatever) to stop but wanted to keep the screen saver. We went into the energy settings on both his computer and mine (a new Imac) and unchecked the energy settings/options/automatically reduce the brightness of the display...) and this has worked. Unlike the experience of some posts we now have screen saver starting either by a hot corner or by our chosen settings but no dimming.
I would like to be able to set this dimming time at let us say TEN minutes instead of 2 or three. Perhaps there is a script or a change that could be entered via the console to do this?

Maybe I missed the answer but I turn my DIMMER off when attached to the Power. In battery, I left on but will probably turn off at some point when watching a DVD or pre-recorded movie.

Go to Preferences-> Energy Saver-> Click Options next to sleep and uncheck Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before the display sleep.

The screensaver and screen blackout are set appropriately for me so dimming is only good when I am trying to conserve power.

--Mickey

I have a similar problem-my screen dims overnight when the computer is turned off-it comes on around 1:30 AM FOR SUPER DUPER BACKUP and then turns itself off-In the morning I have to go into preferences and bring brightness back up in display-I have disabled the super duper thinking that was the problem but it didn't help-I have unchecked dim screen on energy options-when the computer is off during the day and then turned back on the screen is not dimmed-anybody else have this problem?