(Guide/Review) Change the monitor brightness on Windows quickly

[Karlston]

Change the monitor brightness on Windows quickly

Win10_BrightnessSlider is an open source program for Microsoft Windows devices -- Windows 7 to Windows 10, not just Windows 10 despite the name -- to change the brightness of connected monitors quickly.

 

The application requires the Microsoft .NET Framework, which may need to be installed depending on the operating system the application is run on. Just download the program from the GitHub project page and run it afterwards, an installation is not necessary.

 

 

Note that you may get Safe Browsing and Windows SmartScreen warnings when you download and/or execute the program. The application is not widely used and that is the reason why it is seen as suspicious. Three antivirus engines mark it as malicious on VirusTotal, but these are (very likely) false positives. If you want to be sure, don't run the program or run it in a sandbox.

 

Win10_BrightnessSlider adds an icon to the Windows System Tray which you may see right away or not, again depending on the system you run it on. Select the icon directly or the up-arrow icon on Windows 10 and then the icon, to display the sliders.

 

The program supports multi-monitor systems, and you may use it to change the brightness on these systems using the sliders that it displays. I ran into a detection issue, as it displayed two sliders, one with the brightness value -1, on a single monitor test system. Using that slider crashed the app, using the other slider changed the brightness level of the monitor as expected.

 

Windows 10 users may right-click on the taskbar, select Taskbar Settings, and on the page that opens "select which icons appear on the taskbar" to display the Win10_BrightnessSlider icon in the system tray area directly to save one click.

 

A right-click on the program icon displays an option to run the program on startup, so that it is available right away. The program reacts to certain events, e.g. monitor power on or off, or plug/unplug, and comes with a rescan option to add or remove monitors from its interface after plug or unplug events.

Closing Words

Not everyone needs a brightness slider in the system tray area of the Windows operating system, but some users may like it. Besides the ability to quickly change the brightness on desktop systems, it is also useful when hardware brightness buttons are defect, or when multiple monitors need to be managed with different and changing brightness settings.

 

Landing Page: https://github.com/blackholeearth/Win10_BrightnessSlider

 

 

Change the monitor brightness on Windows quickly