Laptop randomly dimming screen

Jesusfrk611

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I have a Gateway MC7800. It's always had this problem where it will decide itself if it wants to dim or brighten the screen on its own. I liked my HP laptop that dimmed when I wanted it to or when I unplugged the power cable, and brightened when I plugged it back in. Sometimes this will work right, and sometimes I'll be using the laptop when out of the blue the screen dims when I'm typing something while it's plugged in to the power cable. Usually it will dim when I unplug it, but doesn't seem to like to brighten when I plug it back in. I have messed with the power settings in Windows 7 a couple times and it seems to want to change the settings on me sometimes. This is not an OS issue though because it's dual booting with Ubuntu and it does the exact same thing...

On a side note, only when in Windows 7, when I leave the laptop in sleep mode every time I have a USB mouse plugged in and I unplug it before I take it out of sleep it restarts the laptop. Doesn't do that in Ubuntu and I don't recall ever having that issue in a previous install of Windows.

Thoughts on either? Might do an OS reinstall soon because there's other issues with Windows, but I know that won't fix the backlight issue.
 
My HP laptop has a light-sensor that I can enable in BIOS to auto-dim a screen based upon the ambient lighting. Any chance your gateway has that kind of feature?
 
how old is your computer?? Its possible it has developed a fault

I dont think re-installing windows will help, but you never know
 
maybe a problem with the charger itself. if its malfunctioning:confused:
It seems to be working fine. Windows and Ubuntu both show when it's running on AC power or battery. When it randomly dims it doesn't go into battery power.

My HP laptop has a light-sensor that I can enable in BIOS to auto-dim a screen based upon the ambient lighting. Any chance your gateway has that kind of feature?
I tried turning on and off the lights a couple times and that didn't work. I'll go into BIOS shortly and look into it anyway.

EDIT: The BIOS did have an ambient light sensor enabled. I disabled it. Don't know why it doesn't always work if this is the problem. I'll report back in a day or 2 and see if it's still doing it.

how old is your computer?? Its possible it has developed a fault

I don't think re-installing windows will help, but you never know
Bought it new November 2009. As far as I remember it has always had the dimming issue and only recently started the mouse restart thing. I've had a couple issues with this install of Windows, so at least it will hopefully fix something if not the restart from unplugging the mouse in sleep.

The best correlation to anything I can think of for the screen dimming is when I bump the laptop sometimes it does it. But when I try to replicate it, no dice. If it wasn't clear before, the backlight just dims, and I can use the buttons on the keyboard to put it back to bright as soon as it does it. It's just stupidly annoying.
 
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