Toughbook CF-30 MK2 Windows 7 x64 brightness

Short Story

Change the brightness in the bios from “High Brightness” to “Normal Brightness”

Long Story

Like many organizations we try to get as much life out of our mobile equipment as we can.  This time around I was working on some Panasonic CF-30 toughbooks, upgrading them to windows 7 64 bit, installing SSDs and adding 8 gigs of ram to them.

When all the upgrades were complete it was like a new laptop!  Kudos goes to the great people over to toughwiki for making a great set of instruction for all the drivers I needed.

So with the software installed I’m sent the toughbooks into the field, only to have them come back the next day saying the back-light blinded the drivers at night.

I searched and searched and tried and tried and nothing worked.  Forum after forum, walk through after wiki and none of the “solutions” worked to allow either the keyboard or windows to dim the back-light.

We had it sitting on the bench for a while and ended up needing the power outlet that it was plugged into for another project.  My co-worker started working on the toughbook again with fresh eyes and that’s when we noticed it.  The back-light dimmed when on battery!  not only that it was controllable from the keyboard using the function keys!  We plugged it back in and sure enough we couldn’t control the back-light.  After some more searching with new information we landed at the bios.  There is a display setting for high brightness or normal brightness.  If its on high brightness the laptop cannot control the brightness level, normal it can be controlled either on battery or off.