[gfunk87]

My girlfriend bought a dell C810 notebook off eBay. For the price she paid for it it's not that bad of a machine. It has a P3 mobile processor at 1.13 GHz, 256 mb ram, 20 gig hard drive and XP Pro. It works great except for one thing that puzzles her and me. When the laptop is plugged in the screen is much dimmer than when the laptop is on battery power. Sometimes the laptop dims right away on AC power and sometimes it takes about 5 min until it dims. At first I thought it was just a simple setting in the power options, but I was unable to find any settings that would change the screen brightness. I then checked the bios settings but it is set for full brightness on AC power. I noticed the mobile processor was running at 700 Mhz plugged in instead of it's 1.13 GHz processor so I looked at the power adapter and found out it was a 70 watt 3.5 amp instead of what it is supposed to be, a 90 watt 4.5 amp. I bought a new power cord and it now runs at 1.13 GHz but the screen still dims. I then thought it was somehow the battery although I don’t know if that makes sense, so I powered up the computer with no battery in it so it was just running off of AC power and not trying to charge the battery or anything, but the screen was still dim. The laptop came with no dell power management software so it's annoying to me when my Toshiba has its own power saver application that I just go into it and change all my settings around there. If someone could help shed light on a way to make this dells screen work that I haven't thought of yet, I’d greatly appreciate it.

[Advertisements]

Hi

Your post is pretty old but I thought I'd add a reply. I'm having the same problem with my HP notebook. The screens dims when I plug it in to AC power and brightens on battery. However, I haven't noticed the drop in processor speed when it's plugged in to AC power.

Perhaps you should try Dell's power management software called Dell Quickset, I use it on my Latitude D600,

[Ujavaid]

Hi

Your post is pretty old but I thought I'd add a reply. I'm having the same problem with my HP notebook. The screens dims when I plug it in to AC power and brightens on battery. However, I haven't noticed the drop in processor speed when it's plugged in to AC power.

Perhaps you should try Dell's power management software called Dell Quickset, I use it on my Latitude D600,