Chosen Solution
Black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz T8300 w X3100 GPU My Core2Duo (model MB404LL/a) is currently around 2.5 years old. I’ve replaced the airport card a few months ago, and reapplied thermal grease (arctic silver 5) about a week ago. A couple of days ago, I used it to play a movie and some music on the TV. The day after, everything worked fine… This morning, the backlight started giving me some trouble. When I boot it up, the backlight will flash on for a second, and then dim. If I toggle with the keyboard’s backlight brightness buttons enough, sometimes I’ll get the light to stay on for a minute or two. Otherwise, it basically will flicker on and then immediately turn off again. Also, I should note that earlier today, the backlight was definitely a bit more reliable- it stayed on for a while, and seemed like the problem had to do with the screen moving- any kind of abrupt jostle would immediately turn off the backlight. There is no issue with the actual display, as I can see the desktop with the backlight off. I’ve done a bit of reading, and figured it’s either the inverter or the inverter cable. What do you guys think? I am fairly comfortable with taking apart the laptop, but I would love to get some input on the issue before doing any serious work… Are there any quick ways to see if I had loosened the inverter cable during my thermal paste application? Thanks.
If moving the screen causes the problem, I would bet on the cable. If it stays the same while moving the screen it’s probably the inverter. But I would check the logic board connections before spending any money. Here’s how I replace the inverter: MacBook Core 2 Duo LCD & Inverter A1181 (fast method) Replacement UPDATE Apple MacBook “Core 2 Duo” 2.4 13" (Black-08) Specs Identifiers: Early 2008 - MB404LL/A - MacBook4,1 - A1181 - 2242 Here’s how to check the inverter cable: MacBook Core 2 Duo Inverter Cable Replacement
I may have found a fix for this… I was having the same issue with a Macbook A1181 that I bought off of eBay (thinking I could try to fix it for my wife). I replaced the Inverter board and cable. Neither of these seemed to do the trick. I noticed that setting the display brightness to the lowest setting (off) by using F1 then tapping F2, the display backlight would work again for a split second. After this I decided to mess with the “Energy Saver” settings and noticed that when the “Automatically reduce brightness before display goes to sleep” is not selected I didn’t have any problems with my backlight anymore. I am not sure why this setting would have affected this since I was using a charger and had the “computer sleep” set to never and “display sleep” set to 1 hr. But once I selected this option my backlight started acting up again. I hope this will eventually help somebody else! Model: Macbook4,1 (white) running OS X 10.6.8
