Travelmate 8204 warning!

I bought an Acer Travelmate 8204WMLi and found it's LCD-screen very dark in brightness. I'm not able to work with this computer in an ordinary office environment because of the bad screen. I've trixed and fixed with drivers and gammas but still, the screen is not good enough.
Then I bought a Vaio, budget computer, VGN-FS395VP and compared these two. The price difference between these two machines is approx $1900!!! Yes, not the same harware but still a whole lot better both in performance and usability. So I hope never to buy another Acer again

 

The Acer looks like its brightness is turned all the way down. Did you try turning the brightness up(there should be a keyboard shortcut for it)

If you have tried then you probably got a defective screen and Acer should be able to fix that.

 

Yes! The keyboard have Fn+F6 for adjusting the brightness.
Acer also have an extra program called ePower Management to adjust the screen brightness among other things.
I've also tried to install different screen drivers, ati and omegradriver and adjusting the gamma and contrast with no sucess.

 

Its actually Fn + right arrow key

My 8204WLMi is no way as dark as that. I managed to recreate the darkness by pressing Fn + left arrow key. Somthing is wrong on your screen. And make sure you have ATI2evxx.exe on your taskmanager as those are the hotkeys.

 

Yes, u are right. A misstake but still no brighter light ;-)

 

might be a defunct LCD backlight.
But it is supposed to be brighter.
Best bet restore to factory settings. See if its software or hardware based.
Remember to use the Fn + > arrow key because for some reason acer ships them with lower brightness as standard.
Also the latest bios significantly increases brightness.

 

Yeap, looks WAY too dark for standard brightness, as others have posted may be a defective LCD, while the LCt isn't the brightest I've seen, it's certainly a LOT brighter than your post shows, I find mine absolutely fine for most use, and I turn the brightness down while running on battery power without issues.

Your photo also nicely shows what I don't like about glossy screens That glare is just nasty.

 

if i wanted to see myself as a reflection then i would of brought a mirror.

 

Ok, glossy screen is not loved by everyone but in my case I will test this once. So far i've not seen a better screen than my new Vaio with or without glossy screen. I'm discovering new details at webpages everyday now... So I would really recommend Vaio with x-black. I love it and Acer sucks (right now ;-)