Ambient light sensor is the bane of my existance (help!)

[SilentCrs]

Ok, so I got my new MacBook Pro C2D last night. For all intents and purposes it's an excellent machine. It's not running hot (warm, but hot), performance is nice and all in all I'm happy with.

Except for one thing. When I first got the laptop I messed around with the brightness setting on the Display preference pane on System Preferences. That's that weird slider that "glows" and actually moves itself around based on ambient light. If you don't know, the slider actually does matter -- it sets a "base" value that the ambient sensor raises and lowers from. Now I can't remember what it was originally set to.

I created a new account and checked out the Display preferences -- it was back to the original value. So somewhere there's a plist or something that contains the default information for the Display preferences. I searched in ~/Library and found nothing (there's a Display folder, but it looks like it only has calibration profiles).

Can anyone help me find where this preferences file is stored? It's got to be the weirdest slider I've ever seen and I just want to set it back to the default.

 

[SilentCrs]

Ok, called up Apple and I think I found the solution. Unfortunately, it looks like it's stored in sort of a universal plist file that does a bunch of System Preference panes. :/ Kind of wanted to just kill Display preferences and move on. Oh well.

It did kind of bother me, though, that when I asked the Apple support guy "Where is this preference stored (what files)?" he didn't know. Or, rather, he said "we don't have access to that information". It'd be akin to me asking a guy from Microsoft "What does this registry setting do?" You kind of expect a better answer than "we don't have access to that information".

 

[PygmySurfer]

Ok, called up Apple and I think I found the solution. Unfortunately, it looks like it's stored in sort of a universal plist file that does a bunch of System Preference panes. :/ Kind of wanted to just kill Display preferences and move on. Oh well.

It did kind of bother me, though, that when I asked the Apple support guy "Where is this preference stored (what files)?" he didn't know. Or, rather, he said "we don't have access to that information". It'd be akin to me asking a guy from Microsoft "What does this registry setting do?" You kind of expect a better answer than "we don't have access to that information".

I don't think you can expect such an answer from 1st level support technicians. If you really pressed, you might've been able to escalate it to someone more knowledgeable, but is it that important?

As far as the Windows registry is concerned, I've no doubt MS support wouldn't know what oh, 80% of the settings in there do. Hell, there's probably settings in the registry nobody currently employed by Microsoft even knows what they do. Just look at the sheer volume of keys in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. The registry is a huge mess, and it needs to die.

 

[yellow]

It did kind of bother me, though, that when I asked the Apple support guy "Where is this preference stored (what files)?" he didn't know. Or, rather, he said "we don't have access to that information". It'd be akin to me asking a guy from Microsoft "What does this registry setting do?" You kind of expect a better answer than "we don't have access to that information".

First level call support basically keys in keywords to a database and then reads off the suggested courses of action. Something a trained monkey (albeit one with speech ability) could handle.
These folks actually tend to have very little Mac experience.
Once they do, they aren't on 1st level call support anymore.

 

[danielbriggs]

Sounds stupid, but if you have only had it a day, could you make yourself a new account an delete the old? i.e. you won't loose *too* much data (most of which you could copy across)???

Dan