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I am working with two Windows 7 desktop computers, both of which have a unique problem I have not seen before. (To reiterate, these are not laptop computers; they have no battery and hence no battery settings that can be set.) One of the computers has a brand new monitor, and the other has a monitor that I have no reason to believe is malfunctioning.

Please be advised that this dimming is coming while the keyboard and mouse are active. I do believe -- please correct if I'm wrong -- that active keyboard and mouse will bring a dimmed or display shutdown computer out of those states with an active keyboard and/or mouse.

I can be working right along using the keyboard and mouse. All of a sudden, the display dims for no apparent reason. The display will not brighten back up with vigorous mouse movement.

I have looked at articles like this, but I thought displays turned back on with keyboard/mouse activity, let alone never dim when there was mouse/keyboard activity already present.

My question is what setting or settings might be causing this? To the best of my knowledge no one has installed or set a screen saver that might be causing this.

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  • Possible duplicate of Why does my screen dim on a desktop installation of Windows 7?
    – DavidPostill
    Feb 15, 2015 at 18:23
  • (1) In Control Panel / Power Options/ Select a power plan, have you set it to High performance? (2) What exact models are the concerned computers & display adapters? (3) If the display adapters came with configuration software, do they have any power options?
    – harrymc
    Feb 15, 2015 at 20:29
  • From @Nathan: Are you using a standard keyboard (ie no function keys or hotkeys)? I have seen strange behavior when Windows doesn't install a function/hotkey keyboard correctly and you may be inadvertently triggering a dim monitor function.
    – fixer1234
    Feb 18, 2015 at 19:11
  • @fixer1234 These are pretty vanilla computers with standard Lenovo keyboard. The users are not sophisticated that they would be mapping keys. Feb 18, 2015 at 21:59

1 Answer 1

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+50

This might solve your problems:

"Auto dim or also referred to as Smart Dimmer in Windows 7 is available in computer systems that have the hardware which supports this feature. Please see the troubleshooting steps below that would help resolve your issue.

  1. Open Power Options by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, and then clicking Power Options.
  2. Under the current power plan, click Change plan settings.
  3. On the Change settings for the plan page, click on Change advanced power settings.
  4. In Advanced settings, scroll down the menu, click on Display and see if you find the dim feature listed here. You may change the settings for Auto dim if present under display, accordingly to as you want."

The text above is quoted from Microsoft Answers: Turning off Windows 7 auto-dimming on desktop

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  • I can't get to this computer for a while, but I'll get to it before 7 days are up, and try it out. You could have hit on it. Feb 15, 2015 at 15:21
  • I think that feature might be hardware dependent, so maybe some weird drivers or software causing it not to work properly. Since it's an "always plugged in desktop computer", I guess this feature is of no interest what so ever. Hope it helps :) Feb 15, 2015 at 15:24

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