Brightness Problem - Dell Bios

Just searching the forum for Brightness postings, was not able to reply to an older one so here's a new thread.

Seems to be quite a few problems not able to get a dim screen brighter even with the FN+Up control in Dell's Quickset. I had this problem for some time.

This seems to me to be a Dell problem where the Quickset brightness settings can affect the BIOS settings. I thought BIOS was sacrosanct and not affected by OS, but seems not.
I find it happens when I try to adjust brightness whilst still logging into the user account (yes, I'm impatient!).

The result is that when on battery the quickset will only increase the brightness to the max set in the BIOS and not to true maximum.

To fix, I shut down, go to BIOS (boot up with F2 held down) and then go to Brightness and I readjust both Battery and Mains brightness to max. Pity it doesn't stay that way for long.

If anyone knows how to stop this BIOS "corruption" I would love to know.

On my old HP laptop the brightness on battery was controlled by the hardware not OS.

I also had to turn up the brightness everytime I went to battery.

It is there for a reason

roy69 said:

On my old HP laptop the brightness on battery was controlled by the hardware not OS.

I also had to turn up the brightness everytime I went to battery.

It is there for a reason

Click to expand...

I believe that the brightness available even to a hardware slider is controlled by the BIOS. I just don't get why Vista corrupts it.