Recently my Macbook Pro's screen started looking dimmer than usual, and has a slight flicker. When I press the Brightness up and down keys, I see the visual feedback on the screen that would suggest it is getting brighter or darker, but the brightness no longer changes (even on the lowest brightness setting, it should turn the screen off but there is no change).
I have a dual boot with Windows, and recently installed new nVidia drivers on the windows side for gaming (I'm not sure if this is related, the screen is dim in both Windows and OS X). I am also running the most up-to-date version of OS 10.9 Mavericks.
I've played with the Display settings, the Power settings (tried switching between video cards), and I even tried doing an Apple Hardware Check but it wasn't able to find any issues.
Here is my Hardware overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B06
SMC Version (system): 1.33f8
Best Answer
Is the screen dimmer even over on windows? If so the florescent tubes (there are multiple) could be failing partially or completely.