Sager NP8278 - Screen brightness auto-adjusting on battery

Hello all,

I am back again with another issue with the laptop, but this one could be something i can not fix.

It is identical to what this person has posted

Sager laptop brightness keeps auto-adjusting : techsupport

When on battery, the screen will auto adjust the brightness randomly when browsing web pages, opening Steam and so on. I am not sure how application specific it is (as i type this post is keeping the same brightness).

I now recall noticing this when i first had the laptop but always tossed it off to the laptop being new and the system breaking in or something silly.

I normally have the system plugged in as i am gaming or doing alot of VM work on it but the rare times i have it on bettey this occurs.

This laptop has had 3 OS on it all clean installs from Win 7 to 8 to 8.1 and varying versions of nvidia drivers, sager latest from their websites, intel et cetera.

And yet the issue is still there.

Has anyone else had this issue and is there an actual fix?

Being in Costa Rica, shipping this back for RMA would cost me easily $100 to $200 in shipping to get it into the U.S and i also just gave the box away it came in with the foam last month cause a friend found some kitten and had no box so i gave him the laptop one (was the special packaging from XoticPC).

 

There are a few places you can check to turn off adaptive brightness. The most popular way is in Power Options > Advanced > Display > Enable adaptive brightness > make sure its off. Try that and see if it helps.

 

Thank you! found that option and it was turned on, i have now set it to off!

hopefully that issue is solved.

I think because this is my first desktop replacement laptop, i have this stigma that something is going to go wrong with it that i can't fix..

Appreciated Hutsady, my XoticPC guardian angel.

 

Sounds like a good start to fixing the problem. However I will say we've heard of people adjusting that and it still happening. Hopefully that does the trick. Let us know after you've been using the computer again for a while and if it does the dimming or not.

 

Also, I found this works as well. Go into graphics properties by right clicking on the desktop. Go into power and disable power saving technology. I really don't notice any difference in battery life and it seems to eliminate my intermittent spasms of the screen.

 

Well i have the brightness issue still, even while plugged in and with the auto adjust option disabled.

Something to note, this seems to be most noticeable when i go from playing say team fortress 2 in window mode, and i alt+tab to a brower, almost as if it could be a problem with the system trying to switch to the Intel GFX from the NVIDIA 860 maybe?

or even when i first open steam, i can see almost what looks like "re-drawing" of the dark background, with seeing lines as the "shades" change color to finally get to the color it should be.

 

So some testing i just did

i went to this forum i am

Team Fortress 2 Discussion

notice it is dark, it is one that does the weird shading change while on the page.

Then i come back to the tab with this thread on it and the screen slowly gets brighter....until it reaches the max, where it is already set..

So it seems any dark background site or application is causing something to mess with the brightness.

 

here are my settings:



and a youtube video of the effect / banding that steam gets and other dark applications / sites. You see it most on the left side


This even happens when jumping into Metro using the Windows key (dark background) you see the banding issue.

 

Some people report this could be a Windows 8.1 issue but not specific which

Windows 8.1 Update Causes Lost Brightness Settings / Screen is Dim

 

One site said to re-install the Intel drivers, i have updated them to 1 version higher than what was installed to 10.18.10.3907.

Going to see if the banding still occurs or not.

 

You can also try turning it off in the Intel HD Graphics. There should be an icon for it on the right of your task bar, right click and go to graphics properties. Look for something similar to Advanced > Media > Image Enhancement > un check Adapter Contrast Enhancement. It may be slightly different for for you with the HD4600 as I'm on the HD4000. Look around and try to find it in there.

 

So far i haven't seen it do it's funky adjustments, so seems the re-install of the intel drivers fixed it.

 

Nice we'll keep that in mind for a suggestion if someone else mentions it.

 

Laptop is doing it again, a clean install with 8.1 and the up and down is on and off again even with everything disabled, all brightness settings set to %100 as well plugged in or on battery and i just unplugged the laptop from power and sure enough bright, dim, bright dim but incredibly slooooooww

annoying cause sites like notebookreview and spiceworks are light but hardocp.com is all dark and i go all over with web sites.

Trying again a re-install of Intel drivers, but the fact that MS own OS doesnt work with this feature and plenty of complaints i found over the last week seems most people hate anyways...and Windows 10 doesn't seem any better with it

 

Just posted this on [H]
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1041470299#post1041470299

re-installing drivers didn't do anything and this also happens on my other laptop... MS is really starting to annoy me after all these years... either back to Windows 7 for me or these laptops are going through walls it is annoying me so much now.

 

Been a while, but just a note, i haven't had the issue happen, only when i update intel drivers i have to reset the power options for battery and plugged in, with battery alone having the auto adjust, it seems to affect it even when plugged in.

So far so good though on the issue not occurring once the option is set in both options on intel drivers and in windows.