How To Dim Laptop/PC Screen Brightness

Need to quickly dim your computer screen’s brightness? Is it a manual process or an automatic process? Can you only control the screen brightness of your laptop but not the desktop? Now, let us take a look at a variety of methods to dim PC screen brightness which includes both manual and automatic ways of approach.

#1 How to Adjust Brightness Automatically: Laptop/Tablet/All-in-one PCs

If you do not want to adjust the brightness every now and then, you can take the help of certain options which will facilitate automatic brightness adjustment depending on certain conditions (when the system is plugged in, not plugged in, low on battery and so on).

• Tweaking the Power Plan

Normally when your laptop is not plugged in, people tend to decrease the brightness to save power and when the laptop is plugged in, they tend to increase the brightness. But, why do it manually? You just need to set an option which automates the above scenario.

1. First, type in “Power” in the search bar (you can bring that up using Windows key + S).
Once you type that, you will notice an option that says – “Edit Power Plan“. Just click on it. Now, you will be seeing a window similar to the one in the image below.

2. You can observe two sections inside with “On Battery” & “Plugged In“. Now, you need to adjust the plan brightness. So, when plugged in, the system will set the preferred brightness adn the same happens when the laptop runs on battery. You just have to tweak the brightness plan once. If those are the right settings, you do not have to manage it again.

• Battery Saver Mode

  When your laptop is running on battery, you can also turn on the “Battery Saver” mode right from the taskbar as shown in the image below. This will automatically reduce your brightness to 50%.

  

• Automating Battery Saver Mode

  You can set this operation to kick in automatically when your battery percentage goes down to a certain level. To do this, you need to head on to the settings and then navigate through System->Battery. Here, you will have to scroll down a bit to find “Battery Saver” section as shown in the image below. Set it according to what you prefer.

  

#2 How to Adjust Brightness Manually: Laptop/Tablet/All-in-one PCs

• Using the function keys

If you have a laptop or a tablet or an all-in-one PC, your keyboard most probably must have the function keys with brightness icon printed on at least two of them (usually F1 & F2). And, if that is the case, you must have the Function (Fn) key as well. Here’s an image that points out the Function key:

All things considered, you just need to press and hold the Fn button and then press either F1/F2 to increase/decrease the screen brightness on your laptop.  It is that simple!

• Without using the function keys

May be you do not have those keys on your keyboard or it just does not work for you. In either case, you can adjust the brightness of your PC from within the settings on your Windows machine.

Here’s how to do that:

1. In the windows tray, you will find a battery icon. Click on that to observe two toggle options appearing; one – “Battery Saver” and the second one would mention the percentage of brightness as shown in the image above.

2. You need to click on the option that displays the percentage of brightness and tweak the brightness of the screen.

 

If for some reason, this does not work. You can simply head on to the settings (on Windows 10) and then navigate your way to the display option as shown in the image below. You will now observe a brightness slider to adjust it yourself. Tap on it and drag it to the left to dim PC screen brightness.

For a system running on Windows 8 or 7, you will need to get inside the control panel and navigate your way through “Hardware and Sound” -> “Power Options“. You will encounter a brightness slider similar to the one above, adjust it to your preference.

#3 How To Adjust Brightness Manually On A Desktop With An External Display

If you have a desktop assembled, you can’t really control the brightness from within Windows. So, you need to manually adjust the brightness by pressing the menu button and tweak the brightness level. You will usually find it next to the power button of the monitor (bottom portion).

We would not recommend trying out a software tool to make it happen. It may not work or simply make things worse for you.

Wrapping Up

You’ve now known about the best ways to adjust or modify the brightness on your PC.

Do you know of some interesting methods that we didn’t know before? Let us know in the comments down below.

Ankush Das
Categories: Computers
Tags: desktop pc, Laptops