After Screen is Dimmed, the XP screen suddenly becomes bright after 5 secs

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After Screen is Dimmed, the XP screen suddenly becomes bright after 5 secs

I have Windows XP SP2 2003 OEM. I installed it onto my new 15" 2.5GHz MacBook Pro. I then ran the Mac Install Disk 1 to run the Bootcamp installer for getting all the communications and keyboard drivers installed. Once I did this, everything was working perfectly. I was able to use the F1 and F2 keys to dim or brighten the screen.

Then, since I could connect to the internet after this install, I went ahead and let Windows run an update. It had about 95 items to update. As soon as this was finished updating, All the keyboard functions quit working properly. When I dimmed the screen, 5 seconds later the screen became super bright. I dimmed the screen again and 5 seconds later, the screen went back to full brightness. I checked the NVIDIA settings and the brightness bar is all the way to the Right. I moved it to the left and it jumped back to the right. I ran the Bootcamp 2.1 update and it didn't do anything to correct this.

Is there a fix or solution for this bug? If not, then I'm tempted to go back to when everything was working and not let windows run the update. but I heard that this can mess up windows.

15" 2.5GHz MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 12, 2008 1:01 AM

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Answer 1

May 13, 2008 9:08 AM in response to Tomb Stone

I had the same problem after updating my nVidia drivers to 169.61.

The problem is, the Apple brightness manager (whatever it is called), and the nVidia smartdimmer compete with each other.

In my case, I found a registry key (smartdimmerenable) that I changed from 1 to 0, and after that the two didn't compete.

You have the opposite problem... you want the smartdimmer controls to work (since your keyboard controlls don't), and the Apple brightness manager to stop messing with the brightness. Unfortunately, I don't know how to disable the Apple brightness controls.

Maybe you can attack it from the other direction and get your keyboard controls working, and set the smartdimmerenable registry key to 0 so they don't compete.

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Answer 2

Tomb Stone Author

Level 1

125 points

May 20, 2008 1:13 PM in response to Tomb Stone

I decided to remove Windows and thought that I could find a better solution by installing Ubuntu. Well, that was a waste of time because I could never find a solution to the dimmer issue. So, I went back, made a new partition, and installed Windows XP again. I ended up having to reformat my entire hard drive and having to reinstall Mac OSX Leopard. But, everything is working perfectly now.

The only thing I did differently this time around was to
1. install Windows XP Pro SP2
2. run the Mac OSX Installer Disk 1 which installed Boot Camp 2.0.
3. run the Apple Software Update program
This program downloaded and installed Boot Camp version 2.1, Safari and Quicktime
4. I manually installed Internet Explorer 7
5. waited until Windows XP Pro SP2 told me that it had updates available, and then I installed them.

For each step, I waited to see if the smart dimmer malfunctioned and luckily I didn't have a problem.

I didn't use these steps when had originally installed Windows XP Pro SP2. Back then, I did step #1 and then went to the Microsoft website to begin installing the updates. After that, the problem appeared.

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Answer 3

Tomb Stone Author

Level 1

125 points

May 20, 2008 1:44 PM in response to Tomb Stone

I resolved the problem on my own.

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Answer 4

Jun 1, 2008 1:13 PM in response to Tomb Stone

HOW?

I'm having the same problem... Please describe how you resolved it.

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Answer 5

Jun 12, 2008 10:33 AM in response to Moonlight Mac

I am having the same problem of the Boot Camp brightness controls competing with the "Smart Dimmer" of the Nvidia drivers. I followed Moonlight Mac's suggestion of going into the registry and changing the value of "smartdimmerenable" to "0"

However, this registry key is nowhere to be found. I had to have spent well over an hour trying to find it. I am using a 17in Santa Rosa MacBook Pro 2.4ghz (mid 2007) with the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT. I am using the most updated Boot Camp drivers 2.1 - I have tried using the search tool in the registy, tried many many different variations on the name of that key, and ive tried to manually find anything even close to the name of the key suggested by digging tirelessly thru the different keys. All to no avail.

Are you sure that is the name of the key? Could it be under a different name?
Do you or anybody know the exact location and name of the registry key for the Nvidia smart dimmer contol so i can disable it? The conflict of brightness control in Windows is driving me absolutely insane!

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Answer 6

Jun 12, 2008 10:44 AM in response to reinhardt3293

After I updated to the nVidia 17x series drivers, the competition stopped, even with that key enabled.

I'm not sure that key is even there unless you are running later 16x drivers... and that means non-apple drivers.

I'll double check, next time I boot into XP, but you may just want to try the 17x series drivers from laptopvideo2go. (You have to dig in the forums, not the front page.) Warning, on install they will complain about missing files several times, just close the warning dialog with the close window button and tell it to continue. I think it is looking for all the new nVidia game crap.

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