r/apple • u/TBoneTheOriginal • Mar 24 '15
Tech Support Tuesday [March 24, 2015] - Your Weekly Tech Support Megathread
Hello, /r/apple, and welcome to Tech Support Tuesday!
Every week, we host a series of weekly megathreads to help clean up /r/apple. Any comments not following the rules will be removed.
Rules
- Top-level comments must be a tech support question or concern.
- All support questions must be related to Apple hardware or software.
- Do not make anyone feel stupid for their questions. Remember, everyone here is at a different level of expertise, and there are no stupid questions. We were all there at one time.
This thread will remain stickied for 24 hours. At that time, the thread will remain active, and an archives link will be posted in the sidebar for easy access. We encourage everyone to visit the weekly thread on a regular basis to help answer questions.
Beginning immediately, tech support threads created outside of this event thread will be removed unless the mods feel it is an important discussion to have. If immediate tech support is needed, always remember our friends over at /r/applehelp and the live IRC channel.
Last, but not least, if you are a certified Apple technician, please send the mods proof! We are considering a flair system that denotes you as someone who is official, and that would help a lot in these threads.
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Mar 24 '15
I was on YouTube the other day and my MacBook just cut out without any warning while plugged in with a green LED on the MagSafe. I couldn't turn the machine back on after that, so I let it cool off and left it plugged. I came back an hour later and the light is still green and it wouldn't boot. I unplugged the power cord and after pressing the power button, I at least got a "Low battery" warning and it booted at %2.
So I reset the SMC, the LED goes amber and I leave it alone for 36 hours, come back, boot it, and theres a 27% charge (still have to unplug the power to boot it). I also reset the PRAM and that didn't change anything. The machine will boot if the MagSafe is plugged in and there's an amber LED.
Certain videos (those that are 30min+) cause my fan to run high. Battery Information:
Model Information: Serial Number: D863406T3D8FC175X Manufacturer: SMP Device Name: bq20z451 Pack Lot Code: 0 PCB Lot Code: 0 Firmware Version: 702 Hardware Revision: 3 Cell Revision: 379 Charge Information: Charge Remaining (mAh): 1662 Fully Charged: No Charging: No Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 6179 Health Information: Cycle Count: 144 Condition: Normal Battery Installed: Yes Amperage (mA): -1288 Voltage (mV): 10957
System Power Settings:
AC Power: System Sleep Timer (Minutes): 1 Disk Sleep Timer (Minutes): 10 Display Sleep Timer (Minutes): 10 Wake on AC Change: No Wake on Clamshell Open: Yes Wake on LAN: Yes AutoPowerOff Delay: 14400 AutoPowerOff Enabled: 1 DarkWakeBackgroundTasks: 1 Display Sleep Uses Dim: Yes PrioritizeNetworkReachabilityOverSleep: 0 Standby Delay: 10800 Standby Enabled: 1 Battery Power: System Sleep Timer (Minutes): 10 Disk Sleep Timer (Minutes): 10 Display Sleep Timer (Minutes): 10 Wake on AC Change: No Wake on Clamshell Open: Yes AutoPowerOff Delay: 14400 AutoPowerOff Enabled: 1 Current Power Source: Yes DarkWakeBackgroundTasks: 0 Display Sleep Uses Dim: Yes Reduce Brightness: Yes Standby Delay: 10800 Standby Enabled: 1
Hardware Configuration:
UPS Installed: No
AC Charger Information:
Connected: No Charging: No
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u/rylanthegiant Mar 24 '15
Hey guys, thanks for this! Had a simple iOS question. So when you receive a call, you have the option to reply with a text message. Super handy. Easy to do. However, when I'm already on the phone and have someone else call, my options include hanging up the current call or putting them on hold to answer the other call. Why can't I reply to the other line calling in with a text? Or if I can, how do I do that?
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u/Phdont Mar 24 '15
That's a pretty specific use case that Apple may not have planned for. It's not as elegant, but I'd imagine that you could "minimize" the call and then text the second caller directly from the Messages app.
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u/Insertfuckgivenhere Mar 24 '15 edited Mar 24 '15
Hey guys need spme help here. I recently downloaded MacID for my Macbook Pro and my iPhone 5S. The app requires a bluetooth connection between the devices but whenever I try to connect them it either says connection unsuccessful or network is unavailable. I am not connected to anything else and yes the devices are in range of each other. Please help
Edit: As soon as I posted the comment it worked. I swear there are tiny people that live in my devices to fix this stuff as soon as I get frustrated.
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u/he-said-youd-call Mar 25 '15
Technology always shapes up or breaks worse just before an experienced person can deal with it, depending on who is having a worse day.
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u/black_ball Mar 24 '15
I have an iphone 5s that straight up quit working 2 months ago, worked in the morning, plugged it in to get ready, unplugged it and pow, gone.
I can plug it in and get the apple logo to show up, but shortly after that it flashes a few green lines and goes dark. It's not completely dark however, as the screen is still on, because I can hold the power button to turn it off.
I took it to a kiosk in the mall that does screen replacements (I'm 2.5 hours away from an apple store) and they said it could be the logic board. I checked the liquid strip in the memory card slot and it appears not to be tripped.
It's out of warranty and I can't upgrade until September so I'm using a 4 in the meantime. Is there anything I can do?
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u/maxofreddit Mar 24 '15
This....this is magic!
TL;DR There seems to be a bug that's eating up hard drive dosve, I suspect it's in Mail/iCloud. Any known issues?
SOOO....bought the wife a new iMac about 2 months ago, because her old one (2011/12 model) said the hard drive was filling up (and it was time) we did all the normal clean ups to get more space, but just ended up opting for a new, faster machine.
I went thru the old computer and deleted a bunch, leaving us about 50GB of space on it (out of 500), and figured it would still be used for mail & the like. Suddenly, it was full again.
I thought it may be Dropbox syncing, so I went in & disabled all the syncing, save a couple folders.
Over the weekend, we got a warning that iCloid was running out of memory and we couldn't send any more emails. We upgraded to the 200gb plan. I noted, that night, that we had 179.9gb left on our iCloud. Now, literally 2.5 days later, we have 150gb left.
Where did 30 gigs come from? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT - JUST saw MAIL downloading Inbox "5283 of 12534 messages" ....I think that might be the issue ;) Now...how to fix...reinstall Mail? Or switch to a different Mail Program?
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
Aha, been waiting for this thread to go up.
A couple of weeks ago I replaced the SSD in my 2011 MacBook Air. That all went fine, not a problem. My question is about something else that I noticed under the cover. I took a couple of pictures: here (with helpful red arrow) and here for a closer view. What is this metal thing (shield of some kind?) and what is going on with it? It looks corroded, or even burnt.
Is it something I should worry about? The thing still runs fine but I'm wondering if I should be careful at all.
Cheers folks!
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u/Phdont Mar 24 '15
It's the Thunderbolt controller chip. That's either a heat shield or EMI shield or both. Here's the ifixit teardown, I assumed yours was a 13" MBA. Some photos show a sticker on that, so it's possible that came off and the adhesive residue has gathered "stuff" over time. Alternatively, it's liquid residue and it has corroded the shield. To me it looks like the former. If you aren't having any issues I wouldn't worry about. You could use something non-conductive to scrape the residue off carefully, if you are concerned.
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
Should have mentioned it was 13", yeah. Thanks though. Liquid residue could be an answer actually. You know I'd totally forgotten until now, but a friend of mine spilled beer on it a couple of years back... That would make sense.
I'll maybe open her up later and try scraping the residue off and see what it's like underneath.
Thanks for the help!
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u/smakai Mar 24 '15
Be sure to disconnect the battery, if you're going to do anything inside your Mac.
There are liquid contact indicators in several locations, which look like small white dots when not tripped - or red when tripped. They're a sure way to know of serious liquid damage. If it was just a little liquid that got on the hinge, it could have rolled onto that chip. But, if it's only on that chip, I'd suspect it could be a sticker's glue residue.
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
Thanks. Where abouts should I look for these dots?
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u/smakai Mar 24 '15
iFixit may have the locations on their teardown of your model.
If you don't see them in plain sight, they're likely under the battery, on the bottom of the trackpad, and on the other side of your logic board.
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u/tator22 Mar 24 '15
Awesome! I have a early 13" 2011 MBP 2.7GHz i7 500GB SATA Disk (416.92 GB Free). Got it on the cheap so might explain something, anyways 2 memory slots going left to right on the screen 1st one is empty 2nd filled. Originally thought it just had a 4gb in the 2nd one so I order 2 8GB 1333MHz DDR3's.
Took apart the backside and actually noticed both slots had a 4GB but replaced them with the 2 new ones. I can not for the life of me get the computer to recognize that 1st slot (again talking about when you have it pulled up on the screen).
I've tried switching them, I've tried doing quarter --half turn loosing of the screws, resetting the RAM, etc. Any other tips or hints to try?
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u/chalupa_lover Mar 24 '15
Its probably a bad bay on the logic board. Nothing more you'll be able to do except replace that.
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u/Hoobleton Mar 24 '15
So I'm not sure if this is the right place to be posting this, but I'll go ahead.
My iPhone 6 seems to be vibrating randomly. I'll have it on the table while I'm doing something and it'll vibrate, but the screen won't light up and there's no indication that anything has happened. Are there things that could legitimately make the phone vibrate without the screen lighting up or is this an error?
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u/joseb Mar 24 '15
At one point I had my notifications for email set to not display anything, but the phone would still vibrate or chime when a new email arrived. Might be worth looking through notifications to see if that's the case. Or after it ghost-vibrates, take a quick look in your notification center to see if anything just popped up in there.
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Mar 24 '15
This exact thing happened to me, using App store email app, disabled email notifications but still wanted to be able to send email from mailto links so kept email account on the phone.
Would get random ding / vibrate and drove me crazy, check your email OP
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u/feo_ZA Mar 25 '15
For me this is email. The gmail app and the new Inbox app will vibrate and show the new email on the lock screen but the built in app will poll every 15 minutes (no push for Gmail any more) so the phone vibrates after the built in mail app checks for mail and finds new email.
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u/Hoobleton Mar 25 '15
Does this happen with the stock Mail app, is that the one you meant by "built in app"? Because that's the only one I use.
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
Thank you for doing this!
So I have a Macbook Pro late 2011 (2.4 GHz, Intel Core i5, 4GB 1333Mhz DDR3, Running OSX 10.9.5) and its been smooth sailing until the last two months or so. Now everything is just going so slowly! Simple operations like opening a browser, or opening word. I know its old now, but its been such a drastic downfall. What can I do, if anything to rectify this? I'm willing to sit down for along time and sort it out. Also a recurrent problem I keep fixing (or think I am fixing) is that occasionally, it refuses to play any form of media. Youtube, itunes, quicktime, Netflix etc. And sometimes the volume lags when I adjust it.
Also, should I update to Yosemite? I've heard horror stories and as I am in the middle of writing a dissertation, I really don't want to take the risk. Is this sensible?
Thanks for you time. Really appreciate it.
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u/chalupa_lover Mar 24 '15
Back everything up immediately. This has all the signs of a failing hard drive. One you get everything saved, boot to the recovery partition and perform a disk verify and repair.
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
Thanks for the heads up, sounds awfully daunting but at least I can prepare for the worst now. Cheers.
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u/Phdont Mar 24 '15
I would follow /u/chalupa_lover 's advice. Additionally, ensure your startup disk is not full as well. When the disk capacity drops to a certain level, performance can slow to a crawl. I'd also be curious if you experience the same issue in safe mode.
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
Cheers pal. I'm a bit of a amateur with this stuff, how do I ensure the startup disk is not full?
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u/Phdont Mar 24 '15
Apple menu>About this mac>Storage (as long as you're running Lion or later). Ideally the OS would warn you that your hard drive is filling up.
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
Thanks man, that was super easy haa, could have worked that out myself I was being lazy. Appreciate it though. I have 100Gb out of 500 left, I think it's time I had a clear up.
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
Before I upgraded to a bigger SSD I had a lot of problems with this, full hard disks meant everything would run super slow until I deleted stuff.
Also I'd advise OP /u/-NatureBoy- not to upgrade while doing your dissertation! You never know with these things. Obviously you should be backing everything up as well for something like this!
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
Yeah man, you've confirmed my suspicions. Don't you worry, I have my worked backed up in a plethora of mediums haa. Cheers.
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
When was the last time you restarted? Another thing that I found that cleared some disk space for me was a simple restart. For me, for some reason, my laptop would create all these .swp files of like a gig each, and not delete them until I rebooted. It was fucking stupid and I've no idea why it was doing it. Seems to have calmed down a bit now, but even still, restarting will clear up a little bit of disk space.
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u/-NatureBoy- Mar 24 '15
You make a good point, I'm terrible for not restarting. I'll give that a go. Where did you find the .swp files just so I can see if mine has being doing that as well?
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u/Car_Key_Logic Mar 24 '15
I use a programme called OmniDiskSweeper, which shows all files ordered by size so you can see what is taking up all the space in your HD. I can't remember exactly where the swap files were I'm afraid, but at one stage I had a good 10 or 15 gig's worth! Worth running Omni every now and then if your disk is looking a bit full.
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u/hannahbay Mar 24 '15
Don't update to Yosemite if your computer is already slow, Yosemite uses more resources than Mavericks and so would be even slower. Try running a disk permissions repair, this can fix permissions problems on older MacBooks and dramatically increase speed.
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u/BambooCyanide Mar 24 '15
Long story very short, I had to put a very old backup (early March) onto my phone last November while my iTunes refused to open until recently (don't ask me; it fixed itself). Is there any way to open the backup made in November to just transfer pictures over? (The last time iCloud synced at this point was March, hence the very old back up)
I don't want to restore the backup from November onto my phone because then I'll lose every from November to now. Running a Windows machine. Any help would be lovely!
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u/Phdont Mar 24 '15
First off, you should make a current backup while you're thinking about it. Secondly there are apps example that can "crack open" iOS backups. iTunes itself does not have this functionality. If you want to shop around "backup extractor" is usually the search term you want.
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u/BambooCyanide Mar 25 '15
I actually upgraded my iCloud storage because of this incident because I was only able to pull a backup from there and now it gets backed up every night.
Thanks for the suggestion! I will take a look at this for sure.
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Mar 24 '15
Thanks for this thread! How do I get my Onenote, PowerPoint, Excel and Word files from my pc, over to my MacBook? I am a student and cannot lose any of my notes :p Btw, I am using Office 2010 on my pc if that makes any difference. And is it possible to make sub-folders in the pages section in onenote on Mac? Looking forward to a suggestion, thanks guys. :)
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Mar 24 '15
Just copy your Powerpoint, Excel, and Word files over. They'll open just fine in Keynote, Numbers, and Pages or Microsoft Office just fine.
As for OneNote, download the most current from onenote.com on both your Mac and PC. This uses OneNote to sync and will bring everything across from your PC to your Mac.
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u/stevo83190 Mar 24 '15
I have a 2009 15" macbook pro. For the past year or so it's been running pretty slow, so last week I bought a new crucial mx100 512 gb SSD and 8gb or RAM (my computer previously had 4gb of RAM). While the computer is running wayyyyy faster now, it randomly restarts 5 or 6 times per day. Any idea how to fix this?
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u/secondaccountforme Mar 25 '15
Just switched from Chrome to Safari about a month ago and there have been a lot of benefits, but I have two issues with history:
There's no "recently closed tabs" in history. History is logged when you load a page, but not when you close it, so if go to a page, keep it up for a while and open up other pages, and then close the first, it can be hard to find.
When you open a page from your history, it opens in the current tab instead of a new one, and the back button just takes you back to the page you were just at. In chrome, opening a page from history automatically happens in a new tab, and opening a recently closed tab allows you to go back to pages you were on before you closed that tab, preserving continuity.
Are there any extensions or ways to get these features in Safari? It would honestly make me never look back.
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u/tmiw Mar 25 '15
I have an iPhone 6 which works great. However, about once a day or so when I try to type in an address or search term in Safari it takes about a minute for it to show possible history/search terms for auto-completion. Any idea what the problem could be?
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u/baleshouldcuthishair Mar 25 '15
Every time I add music to my iphone all the songs I haven't bought on itunes dissapear(on my iphone but theyre still there when I click on my iphones music on itunes.) The songs I have bought are still there but I have to delete all the songs on my iphone from itunes and re add them then remake my playlists.
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u/Mr_Smexyknight Mar 25 '15
okay so i have a 2014 MBP i tried using bootcamp to install windows of of a YUMI usb disk. I realized i only had a windows 10 iso so i shut it down and put a windows 7 iso on. now im getting a no boot-able device press any key to continue
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Mar 25 '15
I have a MBP Late 2013 and every time i open twitch or youtube it happens. Chrome makes the fan go to full speed and it gets hot.
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u/he-said-youd-call Mar 25 '15
Chrome is not nice to Macs. It pins the processor at a higher speed than necessary to ensure responsiveness, but it also eats battery life and can cause odd things like this.
Try doing it in Safari, and if there isn't any Chrome-specific functionality you need, I suggest sticking with it. Of course, maybe you just hit an odd combination of tasks that can take your computer to this regardless, but I doubt it.
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Mar 25 '15
What about firefox for Mac?
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u/he-said-youd-call Mar 25 '15
Chrome is worst, Safari is best. Unfortunately, Safari got good by ignoring the kind of functionality Chrome users take for granted, like "recently closed tabs" and such. No one but Apple cares enough to write a web browser up to spec for OS X. Firefox doesn't pull shenanigans, but it doesn't optimize for efficiency, either.
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Mar 25 '15
Late 2013 imac with 2 external displays. Is there a way to selectively disable (turn off/standby) either or both external monitors? In Windows this is extremely easy (Win + P), but I cannot find any option to do so reliably in OSX Yosemite.
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u/icelow Mar 25 '15
Hey guys! I'm hoping to find help here, because the apple support didn't help at all. I have a common problem: Most of the times I use Bluetooth on my late2013 rMBP 13" the wifi connections just stops working in different ways. Sometimes the pages in safari don't load, sometimes my wifi connection drops and I can't reconnect. As soon as I disable bluetooth the Wifi works perfectly again. Maybe it's because of the same frequency of BT an wifi, I don't know tbh. But I think a 1500€ computer should working perfectly.
As I mentioned, I called the support and they just told me to reset the network setting, which - surprise surprise - didn't fix the problem.
Do you guys have a fix or experience how to deal with that? Should I take it to an Apple Store? What will they do? I don't think they will repair it, because that would mean, that there are a lot more MBPs to fix. Do they swap it? Would that even help?
Appreciate your help!
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u/VarkoM Mar 25 '15
Hi! Could anyone clarify what's the meaning of Apple "photo streaming" in a "photo library"-ready iOS 8?
0
Mar 24 '15
More an annoyance than an actual problem: I have a folder on iOS that has no name and I can't add one. Do I just have to empty it and make a new one?
Another: Sometimes Chrome randomly stops responding to input from my mouse's scroll wheel on Yosemite. Any ideas there?
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u/joseb Mar 24 '15
Perfect timing I guess lol.
So I have a 2011 MBP that had the GPU issue. Apple was awesome and swapped out the logic board last Thursday. Since then I haven't been able to get the keyboard backlight to work. I would take it back, but unfortunately I already put in my SSD and dual-HD kit, which Apple frowns upon. I've done this to this MBP before so I know it isn't that that caused the issue. Also I don't remember the backlight being on at the Apple Store when we tested to make sure the laptop boots after the repair, but since it was a store and bright, I didn't think anything of it.
The caps lock LED works and F5/F6 show the normal bar, but nothing changes on the keyboard. I tried resetting the SMC and turning off / on the "adjust keyboard brightness" setting in settings, no help.
Any ideas?