how to lower minimum brightness on thinkpad

i've got an x301 whose min brightness's too bright. it didn't use to be like that. i remember a couple of OS installs back, the min brightness was really dark, and that saved me alot of battery. now the min brightness is bright enough for me to use even under moderate sunlight.

i've lowered the min brightness setting in battery settings to the lowest, as well as used Fn+End to lower to the lowest as well.

anyone know of any setting i can tweak to restore the min to the correct point?

*i'm on win7

 

Is it just me or should this be OS independent because you can lower the brightness with the fn keys when in bios which should not have to do with the OS installed. Or do you notice a jump in brightness when you boot into 7? I am not sure if the brightness is higher for me in 7 but it seems the same to me subjectively.

 

There's one solution to this currently: install the original Vista graphics drivers from the Lenovo site (either 32 or 64-bit, depending on your version). Assuming you have all the other Power Management-related drivers installed, this will fix the brightness issue. Unfortunately, you will lose some of the 2D hardware acceleration features of the Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 by doing this.

Also, with either driver installed, I have a 1-2 second flickering on my T400s (I used to have an X301 and had the exact same problem in Win7) while the screen seems to "reset" when the AC is plugged in or unplugged. This promptly kills Skype video calls and certain video codecs, forcing me to reload the software. It's pretty inconvenient for a machine that's designed with videoconferencing in mind, and I sure wouldn't want to use this machine for any critical video communication for this reason.

I wish all laptop manufacturers were more on top of things on the Windows 7 video driver front. Lenovo, for example, has had nearly every Windows 7 driver and application available for months now, but hasn't released any Windows 7 beta Intel graphics drivers at all. Since manufacturers modify the default drivers with various power management customizations, the generic Intel drivers (that are included with Windows 7, for example) will not work properly. Why Lenovo hasn't released even beta drivers by this point (with the retail release only a month away) is beyond me.

 

Strange the intel drive installed on my x200...

 

I'm not sure about the x200, but I can confirm that although the generic Windows 7 Intel drivers install on the X301 and T400s, the brightness range and on-screen display are not the same as the original Lenovo-modified Vista drivers. Until we have the official Lenovo-modified Windows 7 drivers, the only ideal solution for a fully-working system is to use the Vista drivers.

One thread (I also contributed to) over at Lenovo's beta forum regarding this issue is here.

 

hey guys, sorry for responding late. what are these 2D hardware acceleration features and do i need them?

when i wanna install the vista video drivers, it says that my computer's current version is 8.15.10.1808, and if i wanna install 7.15.10.1752 over it. so i did just that, and the brightness range is back to the full one. i'm just interested to know what i lost in the process.