will the new ambient light sensor kill your machine? read on...
i recently purchased a refurbished 17" powerbook from macconnection. upon receiving it i immediately opened it up and began to try it out, and everything seemed grand. no scratches or marks, no dead pixels, everything in original packaging. it seemed to be a wonderful deal ($300 dollars less than a new machine).
after i had charged up the battery and had spent about an hour and a half toying with the new aluminum slab, i decided to take it into a darkened room to check out the ambient light sensor action. it did indeed work, but immediately after adjusting the screen brightness to the low light, and the after the keyboard backlight activated, the machine froze up completely. i had to restart it with the power button, and it had some trouble booting up. after a few tries it did boot up successfully, but the ambient light sensor immediately came on again, and then *poof!*, the machine freezes up again.
after this second crash the powerbook refused to boot up at all, only exhibiting kernel panic screens or sometimes nothing at all. i tried reinstalling the os several times, taking out each RAM dimm to check if there was bad RAM, doing the hardware test, everything. nothing was providing any hope. applecare had no further answers or options for me besides sending the machine in for repair.
luckily, because it was a refurb and i had just received it, macconnection graciously allowed me to return it and has since refunded the full amount. (extra points for macconnection! that is a rare thing for a reseller to do, though i would of course rather to instead be typing on my new 17 inch about how wonderful it is...)
now here's the thing - when i was testing the machine out, before it was murdered by the ambient light sensor, i connected the svideo port to my television to test out this feature, and it worked flawlessly. after disconnecting the svideo cable, i did not scan for displays again.
i am curious if the problems occurred because the machine was trying to use the ambient light sensor feature to reduce the brightness of the external monitor as well as the built-in lcd (even though the external monitor was a tv, not a dvi-connected device, so it shouldn't be controlling the brightness that way anyway...), and since there was nothing connected it, some kind of major system hiccup occured that then wiped out something important.
are there any brave souls out there in macnn forum land that are willing to test this out on their sparkling new 17 inchers to see if this is indeed a (major!) hardware flaw on the new powerbooks? perhaps this just has to do with the unit being a refurb, but i tremble at the thought of testing this out on the replacement 17 inch that i will be purchasing in the near future.
- d
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