Most of the modern devices these days come with Brightness Control setting that lets you adjust the screen brightness to a level comfortable to your eyes. A similar set of options is available on Windows as well. This post talks about a very basic functionality, and that is adjusting brightness on your laptop screen. We will see how to change, dim, increase, decrease, adjust screen brightness of Windows 10/8/7 laptop via Settings, Control Panel, Keyboard Keys or using freeware.

Adjust Screen Brightness on Windows laptop

Using Keyboard keys

The majority of laptops come with physical keyboard buttons to adjust the brightness. And these keys are usually located in the topmost row. They are usually linked to the Function (Fn) buttons, and there is a separate switch on the keyboard to switch between function keys and these buttons.

Via Taskbar Battery icon

Right-click on the Battery icon in the Windows  Taskbar System Tray and select Adjust screen brightness. The concerned Control Panel applet will open. Do the needful here.

Via Windows 10 Settings

The other method involves, using the Windows 10 Settings UI to control the brightness of your device. Go to ‘Settings’ and then select ‘System’. Now under ‘Display’, you will find ‘Change Brightness’ slider on the top. Move that slider to adjust the brightness of your device.

If your device comes with sensors capable of light intensity detection, then you might also see ‘Change brightness automatically when lighting changes’ checkbox below the slider. Enable this Adaptive brightness feature if you want the brightness to be automatically adjusted. Adaptive brightness is a feature where Windows checks the lighting conditions of your computer’s surroundings and adjusts the brightness and contrast level automatically.

Via Action Center

Apart from Settings, there is another quick way to change the brightness. Open ‘Action Center’ from the bottom right corner and then hit the ‘Brightness’ button. This button would let you change your computer’s brightness in discreet levels of value 25. Apart from this, you can also enable ‘Night Light’ that adjusts the screen colors so that the screen is comfortable to use at night. Using ‘Night Light’ will reduce the stress on your eyes before you go to sleep.

These were some of the inbuilt methods to adjust the screen brightness. Now we will move on to some freeware that let you do the same but with a twist.

Windows10_BrightnessSlider freeware

This freeware was written to simplify the process of adjusting the brightness. It brings a volume like a slider adjuster in the system tray area that can be used to adjust brightness. The slider comes very handy and is easy to get familiar with as we are already using the audio slider. And the program can automatically start itself on every Windows startup so that you don’t need to run it again and again. The tool is completely free of cost and is available along with its source code on GitHub.

Screen brightness not working

If you are not able to access the brightness slider for an external monitor, then you need to use the buttons provided on the monitor itself. Or you may follow the instructions provided by the manufacturer to adjust the brightness. In any other scenario, where the brightness slider is not working, or there are no changes even if the slider is working, you may need to reinstall/update the graphics drivers on your computer. There are several free Driver Updater software that can help you do this.

TIP: You can further reduce or dim the brightness of your laptop screen using these freeware.