Previously, we talked about how you can manually turn off a laptop or laptop LCD screen using a utility called Turn Off LCD. Today we will share with you another tip on how to dim or brighten your LCD screen. I can easily brighten Acer’s laptop screen by pressing Fn + Left keys at the same time to brighten it or Fn + Right keys to dim it. Key combinations are different for each laptop. Some are Fn + F7 for shutdown and Fn + F8 to turn it on.
You should see which keys are used by looking at them and look for which keys have an icon for brightness, usually in light blue. If you can’t find it, check your laptop’s manual for whether there is a shortcut for this purpose. But most of the ones I see are Fn keys, number keys, or special keys like arrow keys, and so on.
A laptop LCD monitor is not like a desktop LCD monitor, where there are buttons for you to adjust brightness, contrast, color, etc., so if your laptop doesn’t have keys. The combination can be used to adjust the LCD’s brightness, Or if you have a key variety that doesn’t seem to work because a broken FN key can’t be remapped, you’re pretty much stuck. Towels with either too dim or too bright the screen.
But no worries, as there are a few solutions for how to adjust the brightness of your LCD screen easily.
1. DimScreen
DimScreen is part of Skrommel’s 1-hour software hosted at DonationCoder. It’s small, easy to use, and serves its purpose to dim the entire screen.
DimScreen is portable and only 400KB in size. While it was running, it only took 1.6 MB of memory. To change the brightness, you can right-click the tray icon and choose a blur ratio. If you go to settings, you can configure a hotkey to increase or decrease opacity easily.
There is only one problem with this tool when you are playing video on your computer. The video will only show a black screen. However, I tried to dim the screen with DimScreen and played Counter-Strike but with no effect. DimScreen was implemented with the AutoHotKey scripting language.
2. Volumouse
Volumouse is a utility developed by NirSoft and can be used to adjust screen brightness. It was initially developed to control the system’s sound via the mouse wheel, but many other features have been added to it as time has gone by. Volumouse is only around 100KB, much smaller than DimScreen, and can do much more.
To use Volumouse to control screen brightness, you need to set up a rule for it by selecting a key to rate from the first drop-down box and selecting “Screen Brightness” from the drop-down menu of Component. The picture below is when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll down the mouse wheel, the screen dims. And when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll up the mouse wheel, the screen gets brighter.
Volumouse also has an on-screen display or percentage meter option and implements specific rules for certain programs.
If you want to use Volumouse on a laptop, it will depend on whether you have a mouse connected or whether your touchpad has a scrolling option.
If you want to make the screen brighter or dimmer, you should also check the graphics adapter driver settings because there is usually an option to change the color, brightness, gamma level, RGB, etc.
