M17x Fn F4 and F5 Brightness Control

I can no longer adjust the screen brightness with the Fn+F4 or F5 combo. Anybody know what the deal is? I seem to remember coming across it in a thread somewhere but never did find a real solution. Any help or ideas?

 

That's probably the video driver problem. Which one are you running?

 

257.15 and it prolly is the driver. Just was wondering if anyone had found a solution since these new drivers came out.

 

Same issue here with the ati cards though.
In my case restart helps but after a while I can't control brightness again. I thought it was after connecting a tv to it, but it's not.
And it happened on two different video drivers.

I am trying to understand what is responsible for monitoring those fn+xx events. It's not the cc or the osd cause it's working even without cc/osd installed. And I don't think it's the video driver too. Can someone explain how it works?

 

I never bother with th F4/F5 i use Display Brightness Gadget its nice. As i am forever changing brightness on RGB it's really handy,Works with Win 7 give it a try lads.

Display Brightness Vista Gadget - Projects

 

nice find sauce, the problem is that in my case all i see is a grey square w/o the ability to change the brightness. It just shows that the problem is in the source, something is disabling the ability to change brightness.
Here's a screenshot

 

mfractal
That's strange works fine for me on win 7.

 

when it works my fn buttons work too, when function buttons stop working it stops too

 

I'd roll back to 10.3, Bro.

 

Will try it this week. No way around it

 

I experienced something similar twice after upgrade of a display driver. For me, it was solved by reinstalling the OSD application after installing the display driver. Might be worth the try.

 

That....is nice! But now I like a previous poster, have mysteriously regained the use of the Fn combo. Might have something to do with the ded./int. graphics and battery/AC? I don't know. I'll wait till it does it again and see if/what I did different. Love that gadget though.

 

I'm on a M17x R2 (ATI 2x5870s, no integrated gfx) and get the problem, too.
Just noticed it happening after resuming from standby - maybe that's a trigger?

Also, the Windows Mobility Center doesn't display the brightness control at all, and the standard Windows brightness control (under the power plan settings) has no effect. Probably different symptoms to the same cause, like the grey sidebar gadget (I haven't tried that one).

In addition, the OSD popup doesn't appear for volume changes or muting.
Restarting the HappyOSD service didn't help.

I'll try rebooting now... yep, that fixed it!
Fn+F4 and F5 works, brightness reappears in the mobility center, OSD popup appears on brightness and volume changes.

I tried a standby+wakeup cycle: this didn't trigger the problem. Next time it happens, I'll try finding a reliable way to restart the OSD, as well as logging out and back in, though I wonder if it's a BIOS issue, since restarting HappyOSD didn't work.

 

reboot will help... try to log off.. maybe it will be enough...

 

Just noticed there's a new R2 Command Center (A07) available from Dell as of June 17th. I'll install that now.

 

The new Command Center did update some drivers, but I still get the problem with loss of brightness control.

 

Yes, the solution would be using older drivers. I remember having issues with 280's from 195.62 and newer. Was perfect with 186.82 and the ancient 179.85

For me 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 work with no issues.