How-To Geek
Disable Adaptive Brightness in Windows to Fix Dark Screen Problems
If you just installed Windows 8 or Windows 10 on your laptop and the screen won’t stay at the brightness level you want, it’s probably because the adaptive brightness feature isn’t working right on your system. Here’s how to disable it.
Naturally, it would be best to have the feature actually work, so you could make sure to update your drivers. If you still want to disable, here’s how to do it.
Adjusting the Brightness in Windows 8 or Windows 10
Just so we’re clear, here’s how to change the brightness on your Windows 8 laptop… hit the Win+I shortcut key combination (that’s a capital i), and then you’ll see the brightness control right there.
If you’re in Windows 10, you can click on the Notifications icon in the tray to slide out the panel, which will look a little different, but should have a brightness control on it.
On my MacBook Air, this setting kept fluxuating up and down.
Disabling Adaptive Brightness in Windows 8 or 10
Hit the Windows key, and then type in “Power Options” into the search, which will pull up the Power Options panel.
Once here, click the “Change plan settings” link on the selected plan.
Then click the “Change advanced power settings” link.
And now, browse down to Display –> Enable adaptive brightness, and change the settings there to Off.
Changing this setting fixed my brightness problems on my MacBook Air running Windows through Boot Camp.
That all sounds great, but I can’t even figure out how to shut the machine down from within windows8, looks good but nothing has that intuitive feel to it, right now I am stuck on the desktop screen and have not been able to get back to screen with the boxes.
Works great. Thank You !
Great. I never knew that existed.
YEAH!!! This was pissing me off so much, and that did the trick! Thank you!!!! :D
They really should have kept this strictly for mobile phones, tablets, pads.
MS should have named it Windows Mobile Operation System 1.
This REALLY needs to be built into the regular brightness control, especially if it comes enabled by default and doesn’t appear to work correctly on any hardware out there. I’m running the Consumer Preview on Microsoft’s own Windows 8 Developer Tablet from the Build conference and this setting doesn’t work correctly at all. The brightness just randomly jumps around every ten seconds even though the light in the room is unchanged and the tablet hasn’t moved.
thank you for the post. Helped me fix the problem.
Seems like Microsoft got it wrong again
Btw, William – You can shut down from desktop screeen by pressing Alt-F4. Like any other Microsoft feature, this is not intuitive.
Did not work for me. Any other options? Thank you
to shutdown you need to press Windows Key and capital i, that wil bring up the setting options. In the setting options you have Power button.
Thank you that was driving me fucking crazy, the whole time I thought it was a driver issue
thanksssss… it works in my macbookpro 15″ too..
I have the opposite problem, the brightness is always at 100%. Even in the bootcamp menu, changing the brightness level does not work.
Any idea ?
THis is exactly whats happening to me on my computer… but mines a desktop…..