T OWNERS WHOSE SCREEN RANDOMLY DIMMS UNDER WINDOWS 8

[court]

Hey guys (and girls),
If you are a T series owner/lover as I am then I've got a piece of info you may find useful. Just 4 the record, my primary machine is T420 (original keyboard), Sandy i7 2620M (6 pipelines/core), Micron 256 gig SSD, 16 gig DDR3 @ 1.5V, 1 gig nvidia optimus, Win 8 pro (upgraded from 7 pro via the ISO via the network) I am a grad student @ Clemson's electrical, computer engineering dept. so, as you can imagine, I hear a lot about how I should be using a X_nix variant. But, I feel that same as the legendary Dave Cutler... Getta Byte, Getta Byte... Getta Byte, Byte, Byte. So anyway, if you have installed the same upgrade you have probably heard that Lenovo's engineers have said that they are not going to release power management software comparable to that they released for Win 7 because Win was now doing a satisfactory job within the OS. Well, this has resulted in me reading in quite a few forums that the LCD's for Thinkpads are continuing to randomly dim even after turning off ambient light sensing within the advanced power options under Win 8. After a number of correspondences with the guys at Lenovo they finally pointed the finger at the guys at MS. So, figuring that it was very unlikely that this was the case (Dr. Russinovich is the person who inspired me to go to grad school) and because 98% of the time it's 3rd party dll's that end up being problematic... I began my search through the Lenovo code and have found the responsible module....

SKIP TO HERE IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT WHY/HOW BUT JUST WANT YOUR SCREEN TO QUIT DIMMING:
(1) Go here and download AUTORUNS
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb963902
(2) Run Autoruns (not Autorunssc)
(3) Open file dialogue within and select "Run as Administrator", allow it to complete
(4) Under... HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run... in the check box to the far left... uncheck: PWMTRV
(5) Do not unchheck anything else if you are unsure of what you are doing. This is powerful software. No need to be afraid of it, but it is powerful.
(6) Restart.

This will take care of the issue. The machine will also run considerably cooler as well.
C-Mon5ter

[sir_synthsalot]

I have a T410s that has random screen dimming in Windows 7. I wonder if Power Manager is causing it.

Does this completely kill the power manager functions? I find that the power manager is the only useful Lenovo utility since you can change the battery charging thresholds.

[court]

No. You don't want to disable this under 7. I am assuming that you have checked everything as far as the software is concerned. So, try looking in the bios and see if maybe there is a power saving setting relating to the display. But, definitely don't want to disable Lenovo's power management under 7 because it is responsible for a number of services that the 7 kernel doesn't cover. Look in the bios and seeing there is a setting there. Also, set your power plan to maximum power and see is this does it. If not, post again and we'll try something else.