How to Dim Laptop Screen?

Ragini Mishra
5 min readOct 21, 2020

Looking for the ways to dim laptop screen? Well, it’s not rocket science and it would become a lot easier for you to do it after going through this piece of article. So, use these advanced methods to prevent getting eye strain, save energy consumption, and get your job done like a pro!

In today’s technologically driven era, persistent exposure to the screen has become a requisite for performing our jobs even for doing small tasks. One cannot argue the fact that technology does reduce human effort. However, concurrently, it may also lead to some severe health issues, affecting the organ functioning in a long term. People often go through irregular or disturbed sleeping cycle mainly because of the screen’s brightness. Besides, your eyes suffer the most due to the bright screen of your laptop.

Several pieces of research have shown that some chronic problems are related to the overexposure high energy light. Moreover, bright lights are often uncomfortable for many laptop users, especially for people with sensitive eyes as bright settings make their eyes hurt.

Furthermore, most people may not be aware of the fact that reducing the brightness to the minimum comfortable level can also help to save up to 20% of the energy consumption of your monitor. So, dimming the bright screen of your laptop has an array of benefits. Thus, one of the most common questions that dwell in the minds of laptop users is “How to Dim Laptop Screen?”

Here we are sharing some of the useful ways to dim the laptop screen. So without much ado, let’s proceed further to look at various manual as well as automatic methods to dim screen brightness of your PC.

Adjust Your PC Brightness Automatically

If mere a thought of adjusting the brightness of your laptop every now and then make you feel weary, you can take a look at some automatic brightness adjustment methods, depending on various conditions. These conditions include when the system is plugged in, when the system is not plugged in, low battery, etc.

Automate Battery Saver Mode

It is indeed one of the easiest ways that can automatically reduce the brightness of your laptop up to 50%. When your laptop is low on battery, turn on the “Battery Saver Mode.” The good news is that you won’t have to turn on the battery saver mode manually each time when your PC is running out of battery as you can automate this mode. You have the option to set this function automatically when your battery percentage falls to a certain level. Wondering how? Well, go to the settings, navigate through system battery and scroll down to the Battery Saver section where you will get the option to set it as you’re your wish.

Automate the Power Plan

Usually, people reduce the brightness in order to save power when the laptop is not plugged in. But why to do it manually when you can do it another way around to avoid the hassle of reducing the brightness on your own? You can automate this operation by setting an option.

All you have to do is to first go to search bar (using windows key + S) and type “Power”. Following that, click on the option saying “Edit Power Plan”. After clicking it, you will find two sections with “On Battery” and “Plugged In”. Here you have to adjust the plan brightness accordingly and you are good to go now!

Thus, by tweaking your brightness plan, you can automate the process of dimming your laptop screen to save the power when your PC is not plugged in.

Adjust your PC Brightness Manually

Adjusting brightness manually is not a difficult job with function keys at your disposal. Your keyboard consists of function keys with the brightness icon already printed on two of them. With the help of these function keys, you can dim your laptop screen.

However, in case your keyboard doesn’t have those keys or they don’t work anymore, then you can also adjust the brightness within the settings section on your laptop. You can click on the battery icon present in your Windows tray, after that you will find two toggle options, the one saying “Battery Saver”, while the other one showing the percentage of brightness. Click on the latter one and here you can easily tweak the brightness of the screen.

You don’t have to fret if somehow this doesn’t work. If you have windows 10, then move to the settings and look for the display option. There you will come across a brightness slider that you can use to adjust it yourself, drag it to the left in order to dim your laptop PC screen brightness. However, if you use a system operating on Windows 7 or 8, you will have to go in the control panel and navigate through “Hardware and Sound” > “Power Options”. And the same brightness slider will appear in front of you that you can adjust or dim the PC screen.

Use Software

Apart from the above-mentioned methods to dim the laptop screen, there is also some useful software designed to help you. These pieces of software are great alternatives, especially if you have extremely sensitive eyes.

One of such software includes DimScreen. It pops up as a black box in the notification section and lets you adjust dimness even beyond the allowed minimum. It comes with various useful features. You can select a % in the tray menu and change the brightness. Alternatively, you can use the hotkeys Ctrl++ and Ctrl +-. This portable software gives you dimness levels to choose from. Considering its advanced features, it can be used for map reading during nighttime if your laptop doesn’t have dimming controls.

Another such software is f.lux, which dims your laptop screen as per the times of day to simulate natural light. Dimmer is also one of the free and small software that provides brightness reduction on LED, LCD, and TFT screens, which are flat panels we have on our laptops and that often can’t be dimmed too low.

Conclusion

So now you are aware of various methods or ways to adjust or dim your laptop screen. Hopefully, this piece of article would add to your knowledge and broaden your horizon. Besides, there is a range of agile software that you can put to use to dim the laptop screen and save the energy as well as your eyes.

If you have some other methods to dim your laptop screen that we missed, then you are most welcome to share with us!

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Ragini Mishra

Wordsmith. Storyteller. Content creator with 5+ years of experience crafting impactful content that gets people's attention.