My laptop updated last night and now I can’t make the screen bright enough!  I’ve tried updating the drivers, playing with the advanced settings and rolling back the update as described in a few online tutorials and nothing makes a difference.

The hotkey controls move the screen icon that controls the brightness but nothing changes and if I make any changes in the settings the screen brightness doesn’t change either.  It’s almost like the control has been disconnected.  Any way to sort this as it’s made the computer unusable, I’m having to be in a dark room with the lights off just to be able to type this!!

Has the power plan changed or does it think it’s on battery power?

yep find the main control panel setting and the power plans

All the power settings are set to full, all the display setting s are also set to full brightness also but the screen is stuck on minimum brightness.  Nothing changes the brightness at all.

I’ve updated the graphics driver (current one was the latest but reinstalled anyway) and that made no difference either.

How can one Windows update screw up a screen??

Well google the Update, Laptop Model and “Screen Brightness” and see if it’s happened to other people

Done that and no-one’s found a solution.  As it’s an old laptop most people seem to have just bought a new one!!  Seems to be a recurring issue to different users on different updates.  Strangely thr brightness is fine on bootup until the wallpaper loads, it then goes dark about 2 seconds later.

Have you got anything set to ‘use ambient light sensor’. If your laptop is old without a sensor and it’s trying to force use of ambient light sensor then

Just a guess really… But worth looking at

This happens on my Dell lappy but only occasionally. I go into Device Manager and Disable then Enable the graphics card. Then the screen brightness buttons start working again.

If this works for you then you probably need to change the start order/dependencies on the graphics driver service.

Bill Gates in Global Gaslighting Shocka!

cp nailed it!

Searched for an ambient light setting and buried in an obscure windows setting was a tick box for using outdoors, as soon as I unticked it the screen went bright again.  Still can’t adjust the brightness up or down but at least it’s useable now.

New computer time soon I think as this one’s 7 years old, I have a feeling it won’t play well with later updates soon.

Glad you got it sorted, we get it here from time to time on older machines and even new ones when we put on a fresh build of Windows 10.

The usual fix is to restart it, check for updates and repeat, or just wait a day or two – in the end it’ll work out it needs to download the display driver for the hardware and sort itself out.

It might be worth trying to download an older driver from the manufacturer. On my desktop machine, the updated drivers that install with Win 10 updates seem to be flaky so I have to revert back to the originals.