Brightness controls not working after wake from sleep on dv7-4065dx?

I've had my dv7-4065dx for a week now (AMD Phenom II triple core, Radeon 4250, Blu-ray from Best Buy) and I'm really happy with it, except for what appears to be a BIOS bug: after waking from sleep mode the screen is at full brightness and I can't adjust it. Brightness adjustment is ALT-F2/F3 on these new models. The BIOS F.07 release notes made mention of fixing a problem with the screen sometimes not lighting up after wake from sleep, which I've also had some trouble with (workaround: plugging my HDMI cable in unsticks it) which makes me suspect a lingering BIOS issue.

It's possible that the ATI Catalyst 10.6 drivers I installed are at fault, so before I dig into this any further I thought I'd see if anyone else can confirm this behavior on any of the new AMD dv4/6/7's?

For $750+tax this is a really sweet machine. The display image quality is far superior to my "old" dv4. HP has finally purged Fast Ethernet in favor of Gigabit in this model refresh, like they should have done around Y2K. I'm getting around 4x the transfer rate to my file server now. BIOS updates now reboot the system and finish the update outside of Windows, which adds a considerable degree of safety. The triple core CPU really does make for a more responsive Windows experience. Blu-ray movies play flawlessly. The various LED lights are smaller and much less in-your-face. The HP TrueVision webcam does indeed handle indoor lighting better.

Office Depot has a similar dv7 on sale this week, adding a Radeon 5650 GPU but without Blu-ray. Wal-mart has one with a Radeon 5470 and Blu-ray. Games are hard on my eyes so I picked the Best Buy model.

 

I just noticed this problem on my dv6z today as well. It seems that the 10.6 drivers are the culprit as other users have been experiencing it.

AMD Game Forums - Installing 10.6 preventing me from changing screen brightness....

What I did was set Windows to "Do Nothing" when the lid is closed and then close the lid and open it up again. That fixes it for me and takes about 5 seconds as opposed to a complete reboot which takes a minute or so. To be honest, it hasn't even done it since I changed that setting and I wait for it to go completely to sleep before I shut the lid.

Edit: If you don't mind could you run some processor benchmarks (Cinebench and 3dMark06 would be great) and temp readings? I am curious to see how the N830 stacks up the the dual core N620 and quad core N930.

 

Thanks!

I can run the benchmarks but as I only have a 4250 they won't be terribly impressive.

 

That's cool. I am just interested in the processor power, anyway. Did changing that fix it for you?

 

Cinebench 11.5 64-bit: OpenGL 4.06 FPS, CPU 1.76 FPS.
3DMark06 1.20: 1859 3DMarks, CPU score 2332.
Max CPU temp recorded by HWMonitor: 66C.

Both run after a reboot. I neglected to turn off power management and antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials). 3DMark06 is reporting the GPU as "VGA", which may or may not be because it doesn't recognize the Radeon 4250. I didn't adjust the screen resolution (1600x900) or any benchmark default settings.

Yup, the lid trick worked. Thanks!

 

Thanks for doing that. I am trying to get numbers on these new processors to compare them to the Core i's. So far it seems,

any i7 > quad core N930 = i5-540 > i5-520M > i5-430M > triple core N830 > dual core N620 = i3-350M > i3-330M