5 Simple Ways to Adjust Screen Brightness in Windows 10

Sometimes is the little things that are most discomforting. Not being able to adjust the brightness of your screen might not be big enough a problem to get you seeking the help of a technician, yet it can keep you in a constant state of dissatisfaction with your laptop.

In different situations and environments, you may want to adjust the brightness of your screen to meet a particular need, like when working in a dark room or next to a sleeping person or you just can’t take the full brightness of the screen due to some eye problems or to keep from having one.

Some laptops come equipped with sensors to detect and adjust the screen brightness automatically, that is if the display is set to Adaptive Brightness mode.

Another possible reason you may want to reduce your screen brightness would be to save up on energy and prolong your battery usage time. Clearly, the screen is one of the highest energy-consuming components of a laptop.

In any of these situations, it can get spooky when you press the required keys to adjust the brightness of your screen and watch it remain the same, usually on full brightness.

In other scenarios, your screen brightness might keep adjusting back and forth without any changes in the lighting condition of the room and without any manual adjustments, if any of these situations sound like yours, then keep reading.

Buy Cheap Genuine Windows 10 Pro License Key (Lifetime Activation)

Possible Causes

Screen brightness adjustment on laptops is one of the functions of the display adapters. As such, any faults with your display adapters could potentially cause such problems with brightness adjustments. If you started experiencing this problem after installing a fresh copy of Windows or after upgrading from one version of Windows to another, then this is very likely a driver related issue. 

It is also possible to experience this issue after installing some major Windows updates. If you installed an app or program that requires specific access to your display adapters or that modifies your graphics adapter drivers, then that could also result in such brightness adjustment issues. Attaching some hardware components like external displays or screen extensions to your laptop could also cause this problem.

In any of these scenarios, you can first try to restart your laptop to refresh your display adapter drivers. If you are still unable to adjust your screen brightness, you can try updating your display drivers from the device manager.

If that still doesn’t help, then try uninstalling and reinstalling the display adapter drivers. If it still doesn’t help, then visit your manufacturer support page, download and install the specific display adapter drivers provided by your laptop manufacturer.

Five Techniques for Adjusting Screen Brightness

Microsoft and other equipment manufacturers understand how important screen brightness adjustment could be and how sensitive some of the adjustment techniques can be.

As such, they provide several possible ways to adjust the brightness of your screen. Here I will be demonstrating 5 of these techniques, there could be more that are not covered in this session.

However, to be able to use any of these techniques, you first need to ensure that you have the right display adapter drivers installed and updated. Afterwards, you can use any of the five techniques below to adjust the brightness of your screen in Windows 10.

As easy as these techniques might be, there are times when one or two or even four of these methods could fail, leaving you only one possible option to adjust the brightness of your screen.

Buy Cheap Genuine Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2019 (Premium Licenses)

METHOD 1: Using the Brightness Adjustment Keys on Your Keyboard

The first and most obvious way to adjust your screen brightness is by using the adjustment keys on your keyboard. Usually, these keys are marked by a sun symbol, with up and down-pointing triangles or plus and minus signs for increasing and decreasing the screen brightness. These keys may be located at the top of your keyboard, or on your arrow keys. 

Often they are combined to function keys, so you have to hold down the fn key before pressing them to adjust your screen brightness.

Some laptops have keys dedicated entirely to brightness control. For instance, on this HP Pavilion 15, you could just press these marked keys directly to adjust the brightness of your screen.

Recover All Deleted Files, 100% Safe, Trusted By Millions‎ (For Windows)

METHOD 2: From the Notification Icon

The second method would be to click on the notification icon on the right-bottom corner of your screen.

Then click on the “Expand” option. Below the notifications and icons, you will see the brightness adjustment slider from where you can drag the head back and forth to adjust the brightness of your screen.

METHOD 3: From Windows Settings

The third method is a little more distant, but as I mentioned earlier there are times when none of the first two methods would be able to adjust your screen brightness for some reason, usually related to your graphics drivers and sometimes the operating system.

In such a situation, going through your Windows settings might be the last resort. To do that you go to your start menu and click on the gear icon to open up your settings.

Then click on Systems.

Here under Brightness and color, you will see a slider for adjusting the brightness of your screen. So here you can either click and drag the slider head or just click along the slide to adjust your screen brightness.

Buy Cheap Genuine Windows 10 Home License Key

METHOD 4: From the Battery Icon (For Build 1803 and older)

The fourth method would work on Windows 10 build 1803 and older builds. Here you need to click on the battery icon to reveal the brightness adjustment tool.

Then you can simply click to toggle your screen brightness to either 25, 50, 75, or 100%. This has been modified to the approach shown in Method 2.

METHOD 5: From the Notifications Icon (For Build 1803 and older)

This fifth method is similar to the fourth only that this time you will click on your notification tool located the bottom right corner of your screen, then click on expand and check for the brightness adjustment symbol.

Again, here you can click on this symbol to toggle your screen brightness in percentages. This method no longer exists on Windows 10 build 1903.

Hope this was able to help you out. If you have any questions regarding these procedures, please post in the comment section to get more help. The video below demonstrates some of the suggestions discussed above.

Below are other posts that might interest you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *