Laptop screen very dim?

barbiedoll

I've just inherited my step-son's old Dell Latitude D510 laptop. After removing Win 7 and reinstalling Win XP, it's now running much more quickly and I've got an extra 1GB of memory arriving from ebay any day now to give it a bit more kick. However, the screen is very dim when I'm using the battery but it is much brighter when the power lead is plugged in. Is there a power setting that I can adjust to brighten up the screen? Or is this normal? (I've never had a laptop before so I'm not sure what's normal and what isn't!)

Thanks in advance!

Browntoa

it does dim to save power , go into control panel , then power options , change the settings to see if it helps

barbiedoll

I've had a fiddle about in there, I've tried "portable/laptop" option, also "max battery", but it's still the same. Maybe it's just a power-saving thing? I don't need it to be particularly portable, I only use it at home anyway, I just wondered if it was a fault. (This is going to be my Linux machine, hopefully!)

espresso

Try pressing <Fn> and the up-arrow key to increase the screen brightness.

barbiedoll

espresso wrote: »

Try pressing <Fn> and the up-arrow key to increase the screen brightness.

Yay!! Thank you espresso...I'd never even noticed the Fn key!