Odd Display brightness problem

[HCHTech]

We had a pretty standard Dell Inspiron 17 laptop in this past week with a described problem of "The display brightness keys don't work". i5, 8GB RAM, Integrated graphics, Win10. Boots & runs fine, but as described, trying to adjust the display brightness with the keyboard keys doesn't have any effect. The display dimmed when you removed the power cord, and got bright again when you plugged it in. There wasn't a brightness control in the settings app, so we couldn't test that. The other various keyboard controls worked just fine (audio volume, switch to external display, etc.). Also the regular function of those keys (F11 and F12) worked just fine.

Passed hardware testing, no sign of infection. We tried removing the display driver and letting it re-detect. We installed the latest drivers from the Dell site, We installed 1909 (it was on 1903) - nothing made any difference.

About ready to throw in the towel on such a minor problem, we found a post somewhere the pointed to Teamviewer as the problem. Sure enough - we uninstalled Teamviewer and the brightness controls started working again. I hope this saves someone else from beating their head against this particular wall.

 

[glennd]

We had a pretty standard Dell Inspiron 17 laptop in this past week with a described problem of "The display brightness keys don't work". i5, 8GB RAM, Integrated graphics, Win10. Boots & runs fine, but as described, trying to adjust the display brightness with the keyboard keys doesn't have any effect. The display dimmed when you removed the power cord, and got bright again when you plugged it in. There wasn't a brightness control in the settings app, so we couldn't test that. The other various keyboard controls worked just fine (audio volume, switch to external display, etc.). Also the regular function of those keys (F11 and F12) worked just fine.

Passed hardware testing, no sign of infection. We tried removing the display driver and letting it re-detect. We installed the latest drivers from the Dell site, We installed 1909 (it was on 1903) - nothing made any difference.

About ready to throw in the towel on such a minor problem, we found a post somewhere the pointed to Teamviewer as the problem. Sure enough - we uninstalled Teamviewer and the brightness controls started working again. I hope this saves someone else from beating their head against this particular wall.

I had a Lenovo in last week with identical symptoms. I believe Windows randomly updated the driver and broke everything. SDIO fixed it for me.

 

[fincoder]

Definitely a graphics driver issue. Otherwise I'd be reinstalling the HP hotkeys utility for that model.

 

[Porthos]

Otherwise I'd be reinstalling the HP hotkeys

it is a Dell

 

[fincoder]

Oops! the Dell hotkey utility if there is one, but often Dells don't need them.

 

[Markverhyden]

Interesting. Those remote session apps do reconfigure the desktop video settings when a connection is made. But usually release them when the session is terminated. On a few occasions I've had to reboot a machine but never seen a permanent problem.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Update the BIOS, reinstall the platform software if any, and update the graphics driver. The issue should resolve in one of those three things.