Z560 Brightness levels

[monk3yguy]

I was searching through the forums and found some threads on how to lower the brightness on my Z560.  Everytime I use the FN + Up or Down arrows the brightness bar does not move.  

I even tried going into Windows control pannel and the brightness sliders on there do not work at all.  I tried reinstalling the Lenovo software as well and still no effect.  The only thing I can do at this time is lower it through the Nvidia settings but that just darkens the screen. Any advice?

[yigit]

re-install power management, and try again.

[monk3yguy]

I already tried reinstalling the enerygy management.  I did it again just for giggles and absolutely nothing happened.  Brightness controls are still not working.

[yigit]

try this way : un-install power management, restart your computer and re-install it again.
http://forum.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-Y-U-B-V-and-Z-series/Y560-Energy-Management-Brightness-Dim-contro...

[Duck3]

Are you using the Nvidia driver from Nvidia, or from Lenovo.
May make a difference.

[monk3yguy · Accepted solution]

Sorry about the delayed response, been busy the past month.  I just recently reinstalled the operating system and the brightness controls worked.

However... after I updated the drivers from nvidias website they stopped working again.  It even left the brightness at the setting I had it at before I updated.  So I rolled back the driver and the controls work again.  Is there any solution for this?  Reinstalling the power management application does nothing and I dont want to use an outdated graphics driver simply for the brightness function.

[yigit]

have you checked lenovo's driver?
http://consumersupport.lenovo.com/uk/en/DriversDownloads/drivers_list.aspx?CategoryID=37684

[monk3yguy]

The ones on the drivers page are the same version I have installed. Still out of date.

[Cefiar]

I had this problem too on my Z560, and I found that the latest releases of the Nvidia driver do not seem to properly support brightness controls. I found that the last Nvidia release that properly supports brightness adjustment is 260.99.

[Cefiar]

Just updated my driver (after forgetting about the brightness issue from last time) and had it happen again.

So I decided to do a bit more digging into the issue. After a bit of googling I found the following thread on the NVIDIA forums:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=200320

Basically, there is a registry entry that NVIDIA sets that causes the problem. You can delete the registry key(s) and the Lenovo brigtness control will work (after a reboot).

The registry tree to search in is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\

And search for keys called 'EnableBrightnessControl' (will have a value of 1).

When you find them, delete the specific key and search again (there may be more than one - eg: one per 'ControlSet'). When they're all gone, reboot your laptop. After the reboot it should all be working properly again.

Notes:

• For those that aren't confident editing registry entries, check the above link to the NVIDIA forums. One of the members there (called rafzak) has provided a .rar file that removes the offending entries from the registry for you.
• Hopefully this fix will end up in the next driver release. I saw something about a fix for the Y560 in this driver (which is partly why I didn't think about the brightness issue this time around), but it didn't work out of the box. Could be that it doesn't create the key anymore, but if it's already there, it doesn't remove it.

PS: If there are any Lenovo people actually reading the forum, it may be worth incorporating this fix into the Lenovo Energy Management Driver installer.