Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I have a 7662 CTO with a C2D 1.8, 2GB RAM, NVS 140M, Ultrabay Battery, and the 80GB HD. Recently I dumped Vista Home that my notebook came with and did a clean install of XP. I followed the XP Clean Install guide over at NR.com. I can say everything does feel much more snappy however, however I am left with one problem I have been unable to resolve.

Whenever I run on battery power from AC power, the notebook will go to the chosen setting from the Power Manager for running on batteries, stay there for about 5 seconds, then turn the screen onto full bright. I even tried Maximum Battery life, and the screen will stay dim while on AC power, then when I disconnect AC, a few seconds later, the screen with brighten up again. If I reconnect AC, it will again dim, then brighten a few seconds later. So basically anytime I run on battery power, or reconnect AC power, the notebook defaults back to some mode with a bright screen.

This seems pretty straight forward however I am having trouble solving it. Here is what I have installed:

Intel 3 Series Chipsets
RAID/AHCI Software
ACPI Power Management
Video Driver
Monitor Driver
Audio Driver
Modem Driver
Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) High Definition Audio
UltraNav Driver
UltraNav Utility
Hotkey Driver
Atmel TPM (Trusted Platform Module)
Intel PRO/1000 LAN Adapter
Wireless Drivers
Power Manager

Also I am running XP SP3 (Release Candidate) on this PC now, though I believe this happened on SP2 as well.

Ok I figured this out so here is the solution for anyone else who may run into this:

I was running the latest official Nvidia driver (169.21) for my NVS 140M video card, and the driver has a "feature" called SmartDimmer. According to the default behavior for this app, the smartest thing to do at all times is to have the backlight on torch mode.