I’ve written about how to manually turn off notebook or laptop LCD screen using “Turn Off LCD“, and today I will share with you another tip on how to dim or brighten the LCD screen. I can easily brighten my Acer laptop’s screen by pressing the Fn + Left key simultaneously or Fn + Right key to dim it. The combination keys are different for each notebook. Some are Fn + F7 to turn it down, and Fn + F8 to turn it up. You should be able to see which one it is by looking at the Fn set of keys, and see which has a symbol for brightness. If you can’t seem to find it, just check your notebook’s manual if there is a shortcut key for this purpose.
Laptop’s LCD screen is not like our desktop LCD monitor where there are buttons for you to adjust the brightness, contracts, colors and etc… So if your laptop don’t have the combination key that can be used to adjust the brightness of the LCD screen, or if you have a broken Fn key, then you’re pretty much stuck with the either too dim or too bright screen.
Not to worry because I have the solution on how to easily adjust the brightness of your LCD screen.
DimScreen is part of Skrommel’s 1 hour software hosted in DonationCoder. It is small, easy to use and serves its purpose, that is to dim the whole screen.
DimScreen is portable and only 207KB in size. While it is running, it only takes up 3.6 MB memory. To change the brightness, you can right click on the tray icon and select the percentage of dimming. If you go to the settings, you can configure a hotkey to easily increase or decrease the dimming.
There’s only 1 problem with this tool that is it when you are playing video on your computer. The video would only show black screen. However, I tried dimming the screen with DimScreen and played Counter Strike but with no effect at all. DimScreen was made with AutoHotKey. Can any AHK coder try taking a looking at the autohotkey script and see if it is possible to brighten the screen as well?
Update: I just found out that Volumouse developed by Nir Sofer can be used to adjust the screen brightness. It is originally developed for controlling the sound volume with a wheel mouse but as time goes along, a lot of features has been added to it. Volumouse is only 29.5KB, much smaller than DimScreen and can do much more. To use Volumouse to control the screen brightness, you’ll need to go to Options and set a wheel mouse rule for it. The image below is for when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll down the mouse wheel, the screen will dim. And when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll up the mouse wheel, the screen will get brighter.
