There's an easier way, no?

From the Energy Saver control panel, click Options and uncheck "Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep"

Works on my iBook, should also on an iMac.

Dimming the display is one of the most irritating features of the mac. I wonder who came up with this idea in the first place.

Unchecking the "Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep" in the Energy Saver never worked for my PowerBook until I did Archive and Install a couple of days ago. By magic, it works perfectly now.

Is there a way to shut off the backlighting completely, like on the PowerBooks, without having it time out? My iMac Core 2 Duo (and the G5 before it) undims all the time through the night and pops up the login window for some unknown reason, and even with the screen dimmed all the way using F14 and timeout set to one minute, this is still annoying. I'd like a way to F14 all the way to "off" like you can do on a PowerBook.

Anyone?

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-- OS-9 Al

If you set the halfdim in Terminal it will not survive a restart. A tip I picked up on the web solved the problem. Create an Applescript, save it as an application and make it a login item. Works great.
The script is do shell script "sudo pmset halfdim 0"

Can anybody explain to a script newbie what should be in this script exactly?

When I just paste 'sudo pmset halfdim 0' in a new document in Script Editor and try to save it as an Application I get the following:

"Syntax Error
A identifier can't go after this identifier."
(the typo is Apple's, not mine ;-)

So do I need to ad something to make this a functioning shell script?

do shell script "pmset halfdim 0" password "yourpassword" with administrator privileges

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MacChelsea

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Thanks, that made the script executable, so one step further...

But now I get the message: 'pmset' must be run as root...

So do I have to enable root just to get this working?

No, you don't. "sudo" in the original script or "with administrator privileges" in mine will make your commands act as if they're issued by "root".

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MacChelsea

Thanks MacChelsea, that did the trick.

I didnt' get that I had to literally copy all you wrote incuding the 'with administrator privileges' (at first I understood that this was just a comment from your side, not a part of the script).

Now that I added the 'with administrator privileges' at the end of the script all is fine, thanks for all of your patience with this scripting newbie!

I have used the half dim setting in the terminal contained in the OP for many months and it has survived:
logout/login
restart
shutdown/restart.

Maybe I am just lucky [about time!].

HTH
TiPB 867 10.4.7

may be you should call apple to fix the "hums" problem, to ensure this little problem don't develop into real serious one after the warranty is expired?

I can confirm that the Energy Saver option does NOT prevent half dim on my Intel iMac. I'll try the login script method.

I would presume the answer to your question is "sudo pmset -a halfdim 1", if it follows standard protocol.

I have been living with this annoyance -- my laptop screen was dimming after about a minute of inactivity no matter what I set this to in preferences, but thankfully this command line fixed that problem for me.

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Above all, a computer that cost more than three thousands dollars shouldn't do that noise. No one seems to know exactly what's causing that humming and Apple doesn't seem in a hurry to comment on that. I have a iMac 24. Very annoying sometimes.

here's an extra annoyance for fans of humming displays: when you reboot your imac, the halfdim setting is forgotten. also, my imac totally ignores the system preferences setting - only this command line string appears to work.

i rebooted again (to apply the latest airport patches) and the halfdim setting was definitely lost. just confirming this wasn't pilot error.