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Is there a way to enable the ambient light sensor on a MacBook Pro unibody while running Windows? I'm particularly interested in a compatible driver for use in Windows 7 x64.

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3 Answers

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No, there's no compatible ALS driver for Win 7 x64 yet. Many have asked, none have found so far.

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This might help :
MacBook Tray Tools - Drivers for keyboard backlight and sensors of your MacBook / Pro.

Quote:

What is it?

If you happened to be a happy MacBook / MacBook Pro owner running Windows with Bootcamp, you surely felt annoyed of current lack of driver support for some neat features offered by this beautiful piece of hardware. For example the keyboard backlight and automatic brightness adjustment based on environment light is completely lacking any drivers. How long would it take for Apple to release the complete set of drivers and how well the Apple hardware will be supported under Windows compared to Mac OS X, nobody can say for sure. The recent release of Bootcamp did not include this support.

I put together a small tray resident application which lets you activate and control the keyboard light, it also accesses the light sensors to resemble the automatic light adjustment to the environment light as you know it fromMac OS X.

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I saw that, too. It was last updated over 3 years ago, which gives me pause. – Brian Reiter Sep 16 '09 at 21:57
Might still work, though. – harrymc Sep 17 '09 at 5:44
If it was open source code then it might work. Unfortunately it has no chance of working because it has a dependency on inpout32.dll. The code would need to be reworked and liked to inpoutx64.dll to have a hope of working on Win7 x64. It is a good idea, though. – Brian Reiter Sep 22 '09 at 22:29
Can't you run it in compatibility mode? – harrymc Sep 23 '09 at 11:15
Not possible. You can't use 32-bit drivers in 64-bit Windows. – Brian Reiter Sep 23 '09 at 17:17
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I tried it under XP with SP3 and it choked my machine... I was barely able to stop the process.

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Are you referring to the MacBook tray tools mentioned by "harrymc"? – Brian Reiter Sep 27 '09 at 16:09

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