Why would you want to dim your screen you ask? Two reasons:
- You read in low light conditions and don’t want to burn your eyes away.
- You want to scrape a few more minutes out of your laptop battery. I have covered laptop battery power saving before.
Laptop brightness can usually be controlled with a function key on your laptop. But if you want software control in your taskbar or want your laptop to dim after a set time then read on…
BattCursor
Here we have a freeware application that can manage your battery profiles in windows in a very easy way. This can already be managed using power options in vista but Battcursor handles it better. For example when your laptop is unplugged it switches off the aero glass interface automatically and can show you your battery remaining in the cursor (hence BattCursor).
The feature I particularly like though is automatic dimming of the screen if the cursor hasn’t been moved or the keyboard pressed for a configurable amount of time.
BattCursor is extremely configurable and also displays your battery status with a floating battery symbol above the taskbar. This turns yellow if running low and red if critical along with your taskbar!
Vista, Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit) versions are supported.
Dimscreen
If you want to simply be able to dim your screen with a menu from the task bar, with an extremely lightweight freeware application, then Dimscreen could be better for you.
The image to the left shows Dimscreen’s right click menu from the task bar and the image on the right shows how it is possible to assign a windows hotkeys to screen brightness dimming.
You could of course add this program to your startup folder if you wanted to run it automatically with windows.
Download Dimscreen via Life Rocks 2.0
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Pallab
1 year ago
Nice finds. I love tiny software like this.
Btw, if you are reading in low light conditions or under artifical light a better solution than dimming the screen is alter the colour temperature. A softwre called F.lux does this automatically based on the time of the day.
GIve it a try. It may seem a little odd at first, but let it work on its own. Once you get used you just won’t be able to go back.
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Jonny
1 year ago
Thats a great tip Pallab, I tend to read under daylight generally or never really in dark enough situations to dim my laptop (my laptop doesn’t seem too bright anyway). F.lux sounds pretty cool though. Will look into it.