Latitude C600 backlight problem

It won't dim the backlight or change contrast at all (its on full bright all the time, 2 fully charged battery's last maybe 5 hours). It seems to have been worked on at some point as the upper right area (pg down/up buttons) flex a lot and it's missing one of the "P" screws by the lid latch.

I replaced the obnoxious (loud, noisy) 20gb drive I got it with (got a 7200rpm 60gb drive) and added a wireless card (Linksys something or other with speedbooster), both work great and I put Mandriva free 2007 on it so if it's a Windows only kinda fix... I can't do it.

How do I determine if the keyboard needs to be replaced or the backlight needs help?

Thanks for any tips, it's my first laptop.

 

I think you need Dell QuickSet.

Not sure if you can get it for Linux though.

 

I must not have read all of the downloads/drivers listed @ Dell throughly when I was looking for stuff.

Mandriva seems to have been a poor choice for wireless networking, it doesn't have nice support for it (in my case at least) (and linux in general makes the techs at my college do everything manually.. hehe) so I'm going to re-ghost the origional winXP onto the new drive and hope that works like it should with the Quickset.

Thanks for the tip.

 

I've tried 3 or 4 different version of the QuickSet, trying to get the oldest ones as the C600 is rather old. None of them support the C600 though, closest they come is D600.
The cathode (under the bottom of the LCD, towards the middle/right side) feels like it gets hot enough to melt stuff which worries me, but I don't know what to do about it.

1 thing I've found thats "interesting" is the service tag only works for about 1/2 of the Dell support site... ie: Go to Drivers/Software and it works, Go to tech support and the tag is invalid or not found. Usually its not found at the same time as the C600 in general isn't found.

EDIT: I figured it out. Don't think it deserves a new post though. It came with bios rev. A03 which had all the controls built in...but they didn't actually change anything. I poked around the dell site some more and decied to upgrade to rev. A23. Aparently thats what it needed. On another note I8kfanGUI is sweet! I have it set to put the fan on full by 70ºc instead of the default of 85ºc and it's on "slow" by 60ºc. No more lap burns for me