Raymond.CC Blog

I just spent nearly $1000 on a new Dell Studio One 1909 desktop computer to work on the X-Ray project. The reason I chose this computer is because the monitor is the computer itself and it takes up very little space. Other than that, only 1 cable is required that is the power cord. The mouse and keyboard are wireless and it also comes with a wi-fi adapter. Everything was so great about this all-in-one desktop but after using a while I noticed that it is lacking of control buttons to adjust the monitor’s brightness and contrast. I searched on the Internet and many people too confirmed that it doesn’t have a monitor brightness control on the monitor.

I always adjust the monitor’s brightness to a very low level so that I don’t strain my eyes. I believe that is the reason why until today my eyesight is still perfect even though I spent at least 8 hours a day on computer 7 days a week. I read the whole manual book, searched on the Internet but I couldn’t find a way to adjust the brightness of the monitor. I found a tool developed by Dell called OSD (On Screen Display) installed in Program Files folder and I thought it could somehow used to adjust the brightness but the program did nothing. After messing around for a little while, I found 2 ways to adjust the Dell Studio One 1909 screen brightness.


The first method only works if you have a Nvidia graphics card.

1. Right click on desktop and select NVIDIA Control Panel

2. Click on “Adjust desktop color settings” at the left hand side navigation bar.

3. Select NVIDIA settings and you can now move the slider for Brightness and Contrast.

If your computer doesn’t come with a NVIDIA graphics card or if the brightness control button is not working, you can use a simple software such as Desktop Lighter to do it. Desktop Lighter lets you adjust the brightness of your screen easily and quickly, anytime you want to. It can change the brightness level by a trackbar slider or by keyboard command hotkeys. To set the brightness you can use both the Desktop Lighter trackbar and keyboard hotkeys (Ctrl+<) & (Ctrl+>) when the program sits in system tray.

This program is FREE and use up less than 2MB memory. What I really like about this tool is the command hotkey to adjust the level of brightness is very similar to laptops. Laptop uses the Fn key combined with another key but Desktop Lighter uses CTRL + < or >. You can even set it to launch with Windows so you don’t need to do anything in future and this tool auto decrease or increase the brightness based on your last settings. Even after setting the lowest for brightness and contrast in NVIDIA Control Panel, the screen is still very bright. Fortunately I can use Desktop Lighter to bring down the brightness even more.

[ Download Desktop Lighter ]