Acer laptop: Vista or Windows 7 screen brightness resets upon every boot

First published on July 3, 2010

I recently dealt with a problem on an Acer laptop running Windows Vista, whereby every time the notebook was restarted, the screen was very dark. The user had to manually increase the brightness level every time (Windows button aka Start Menu button + arrow keys; or Function key + one of the F1-F12 keys; or even Windows button + x to bring up the Windows Mobility Center). Since adjusting the brightness still worked, this seemed to indicate that there was nothing physically wrong with the machine. But Windows was somehow storing a default brightness setting and always reverting back to it. On-the-fly adjustment of brightness was only temporary.

As it turns out, the default brightness setting was stored in Power Options, which enable you to define a different set of computer options to balance energy efficiency and performance. Of course, screen brightness is a big component of this. To get at these options, click the battery icon in the status bar, then click either “Adjust screen brightness” or “More power options”.

This should bring up a listing of power plans, on which you can click “Change plan settings”. From there, you can adjust the default brightness.

In the particular case that I was looking at, the brightness slider was all the way to the left. We have no idea how that brightness setting had been turned down to nothing in the first place, but restoring a more reasonable base setting fixed the issue upon subsequent reboots.

This is not limited to Acer computers. If you’re using an HP, Sony, Toshiba, Dell, Asus… basically any computer running Windows, you’ll find similar power options, although such computers might have their own power utility that override the default Windows power options.

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This entry is filed under Computer Stuff and written by Peter Keung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.