Solved Unable to adjust laptop screen brightness

First, techincal specs.
I have a Windows 8.1 Toshiba Satellite L875D-S7332, with a AMD A6-4400M APU processor with integrated graphics. My display adapter, according to device manager, is a AMD Radeon HD 7520G.

Now, my problem is that I'm unable to adjust the screen brightness of my laptop. I haven't made any recent changes, and I noticed this about a week or so ago(I don't typically change my laptop brightness, so this could have been happening for longer). In the mean time, I've tried rolling back my display drivers, with no success, and also updating to the latest driver set, which has also not worked. I'm not sure where to go from now, does anyone have any ideas to fix this?

Welcome to the Forums.


What happens when you try to adjust the brightness? Is there no setting? Setting grayed out? Or you change the setting but nothing happens?

If it changes for an instant, then reverts to what it was, adaptive brightness may be enabled.

MilesAhead said:

Welcome to the Forums.


What happens when you try to adjust the brightness? Is there no setting? Setting grayed out? Or you change the setting but nothing happens?

If it changes for an instant, then reverts to what it was, adaptive brightness may be enabled.

Click to expand...

I (attempt to) use the function keys on my keyboard, to adjust the brightness, and the slider appears in the top left corner of my screen, but pressing the "down" button along with Fn does not result in any change of the slider. If, while the slider is still visible, I manually change it with my mouse, and move the slider down halfway or so, the screen brightness does not change that way either. If I go to the taskbar, right click the battery, select power options, and change the slider on the new window that appears, that has no effect either.

I have also tried changing power profiles (high performance, balanced, etc) and adjusting brightness on each of them, and that has not worked.

Any other special Fn keys not working like volume up down?

Nope, all those work. And as I mentioned before, it's not an issue isolated with Fn keys, no method that I've tried so far (fn keys, power options>adjust brightness, switch power profiles) has worked.

*edit*

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but I automatically installed about 12 windows updates a week or so ago, from what I can tell none of them included driver updates, but who knows.

OK, on some laptops a utility is needed for the special FN keys to work. If none of them worked I would have gone down that road. Is this a factory OEM install? If yes was it originally 8.0 or 8.1? My ASUS has an A-10 APU and NVidia with 7660M/7670G switchable graphics. I'm running the latest catalyst drivers from AMD, 14.4 I believe.

alphanumeric said:

OK, on some laptops a utility is needed for the special FN keys to work. If none of them worked I would have gone down that road. Is this a factory OEM install? If yes was it originally 8.0 or 8.1? My ASUS has an A-10 APU and NVidia with 7660M/7670G switchable graphics. I'm running the latest catalyst drivers from AMD, 14.4 I believe.

Click to expand...

The problem isn't only the Fn keys though, and this method has worked previously before. It's only just recently that I noticed that any method I try does not allow me to change the brightness.

As for your question, I believe it's OEM? Could you please explain what that means, I'm not familiar with the term. Also, my laptop originally ran 8.0, and I updated to 8.1 when it was released, and I could adjust brightness before and after the update, however long ago the release was. This problem only occurred recently, within the past week or so.

OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, I was just asking if it was a factory install or did you install it? The upgrade to 8.1 will sometimes break things, but it sounds like it worked fine after the upgrade so it wasn't that. Normally I would recommend installing the driver offered by the laptop manufacturer, especially if that laptop has mixed dual graphics, like Intel/NVidia etc. Yours is all AMD so the AMD driver from AMD should be fine, like it was for me. You could try downloading and installing a driver from here, Download Drivers

Do you have power management driver installed?

Satellite L875D-S7332 Support | Toshiba

Select - Drivers and Updates - Power Management - Toshiba eco Utility

TairikuOkami said:

Do you have power management driver installed?

Satellite L875D-S7332 Support | Toshiba

Select - Drivers and Updates - Power Management - Toshiba eco Utility

Click to expand...

Yes, I have it installed, that was some of the crapware that came with the computer when I got it, never bothered to remove it.

@Alpha
So yes, my computer is OEM, to answer your original question.

I performed a system restore to August 16th, and that completely fixed the problem. I will start to reinstall updates (which were the majority of removed items) and see if one of them is causing the problem. I'll post the results here so someone else with the same problem may find a solution.

Also, thank you to everyone who posted offering their advice, I appreciate the help.

You are welcome. Thanks for posting what you find.

Well, apparently they were important updates I removed. Restarted my computer and saw the "Do not turn off your computer" jazz. Let it do it's thing, and was still able to adjust brightness after the updates, so update away anyone who's hesitant, it should not cause any problems .