MMM IT Force Activate! Weird dim screen problem

[oneday]

Hello! I always appreciate any input that the group mind here has; top quality thinkers here. Today's mission, should you choose to accept it, is about my laptop screen suddenly being dim & the keyboard keys that control it doing weird things. If it's beyond what can be diagnosed/fixed over the internet, I have a local repair shop that seems reliable (I've used them once for a hardware issue). So let me know if I should be going to them instead.

Background: I haven't used the laptop for about 24 hours and have automatic updates turned off. Win11 version is 23H2 installed on 3/9/24. The other update recently installed was a "definition update" today. I assume this is virus definitions, so probably does not affect this issue. The last driver update was on 9/16 and the last quality update was on 9/11. So I'm assuming it's not an update issue.

Problem: I'd say just looking at it, the screen is at about 80% brightness. I strongly prefer a light, bright screen (100%). Having to post this is kinda annoying (so I'm not going to just learn to live with it). My light searching on the problem turns up results for older versions of Win, or problems where the slider to turn the brightness up/down is greyed out. This is not the case. I can manipulate the slider just fine; it is slid up to 100% but the screen is not as bright as it was yesterday. When I use the F keys to adjust brightness, turning the brightness UP (Fn+F6 on my Lenovo) the slider moves to 60%. Note that this is the wrong direction!!! A second press of this key combo moves the slider to 40%. Subesquent presses brings it down to 21%, where it seems to bottom out. From there, turning the brightness DOWN (Fn+F5) brings brightness down to 1%. Fn+F6 will bring the brightness back up to 20%, but beyond that the Fn keys are useless. I can bring the slider back to 100%, but it's still kinda dim. Help! I feel like I'm squinting & straining to work on this machine.

Other stuff: In attempt to figure this out, I've looked at Accessibility Settings (nothing is on), Night Light (off), Change Brightness Based On Content (off), Power Mode (changed to Best Performance with no effect), Battery Saver (turned off with no effect).

Any help is appreciated, but if going to the local shop is really the best solution, I'll do that. Thank you!

[BECABECA]

Apologies for this dumb comment, but just in case it is the problem… is your laptop plugged into power? And can you confirm that it is actually charging? Sometimes they automatically dim when unplugged, maybe a new update did this to you and you haven’t noticed it yet.

[Daley]

Apologies for this dumb comment, but just in case it is the problem… is your laptop plugged into power? And can you confirm that it is actually charging? Sometimes they automatically dim when unplugged, maybe a new update did this to you and you haven’t noticed it yet.

Kinda my first thought, too, given the behavior. Though, maybe more a firmware update or something bodged the ability for the device to properly charge, and it's having power saver issues.

The thing that would help the most to rule that out would be to have the make and model number, to see if others have run into similar problems lately. Otherwise, if the battery can be easily removed (increasingly rare in the Win11 capable era, sadly), a good way to test would be to turn it off, remove the battery, plug it in and see if it'll spin up and the problems continue. If it behaves, you may have a bad battery. If it don't, you may have a dying power brick, a loose solder joint on the power connector, or you might got hosed with an update.

[oneday]

Thank you @BECABECA and @Daley .

This is so embarrassing. I didn't realize I'd posted! At the last second, I remembered I might have tech support since I bought it at Costco and that turned out to be correct. So I c+p to a Word doc & I guess hit the Post button out of habit. In case Costco didn't come through.

Even more embarrassing, the solution was to turn it off & turn it on again. 😳

[BECABECA]

Haha, well I’m glad to hear it’s all working properly now!