Thinkpads Forum

So I looked through 4 or 5 pages and had no success and did a search and didn't see a thread. If I missed something please let me know;

Anyway on my w500 (running XP SP3), on bootup before logging in, on sleep, or upon locking the workstation the display dims so much it's hard to see and wont brighten until I login. I've searched all the power settings (windows and lenovo power manager) and don't see an option to change this. Any help would be appreciated.

Start ThinkVantage Power Manager. I have the German version of Power Manager here, so i'll have to try to translate the settings to English. There are two variants of Power Manager's user interface, in English, they might be called "Standard" and "Advanced". On the top right of Power Manager, there is a button to switch GUI modes. Switch to advanced mode if it isn't active already. Advanced mode has four tabs. Click the second tab from left: "Global settings for Power Management". On that tab, the second category from top is called "dynamic brightness settings" or similar. There you can turn off whatever you find to be disturbing. When you're done, click "OK".