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How to Turn Off Windows 10 Adaptive Brightness (Fully Disable)

If the built-in automatic brightness control is bothering you, follow the steps listed below to fully disable or turn off adaptive brightness in Windows 10.

Some laptops and even desktop monitors come with a built-in brightness sensor called Ambient Light Sensor. Using the sensor, Windows 10 is able to adjust the screen brightness according to the real-world light conditions. For example, if you are outdoors, the screen will get brighter automatically. If you are indoors with low lighting, Windows 10 will lower the brightness so as not to hurt your eyes. This is called adaptive brightness. When not needed, you can turn off adaptive brightness.

As you can guess, the automatic brightness control can be very useful in day to day situations. Mainly because it removes the need to manually adjust the brightness. However, the auto brightness in Windows 10 is not perfect. In fact, under certain circumstances, it can overshoot and change the brightness without any meaningful change in the outdoor or indoor lighting conditions. This especially true if the built-in ambient sensor is faulty or got corrupted.

No matter the reason, if the Windows 10 automatic brightness is not working properly, you can easily disable it. Follow the guide below to quickly disable Windows 10 adaptive brightness.

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Turn off adaptive brightness in Settings

You can turn off the adaptive brightness directly from the Windows 10 Settings app. All you have to do is uncheck the appropriate checkbox. Here’s how.

  1. Click the Settings icon in the Start menu to open the Settings app.
  2. Go to the “System” page in the Settings app.
    Open-system-page-in-settings-080920
  3. Select the “Display” tab on the left panel.
  4. On the left panel, uncheck the “Change brightness automatically when lighting changes” option.
  5. Close the Settings app.

As soon as you uncheck the option, the automatic brightness control is fully disabled. Windows 10 will longer change the screen brightness automatically.

How to disable adaptive brightness in Power Settings

The power options in the Control Panel lets you enable or disable automatic brightness control.

  1. Open control panel. You can do that by searching for it in the Start menu.
    Open-control-panel-080920
  2. After opening the Control Panel, click on “Power Options”.
  3. Now, click on the “Change plan settings” link next to your current power panel. By default, the current power plan is set to Balanced.
    Change-plan-settings-to-turn-off-adaptive-brightness-080920
  4. Next, click on the “Change advanced power settings” link.
    Advanced-settings-to-control-adaptive-brightness-080920
  5. Expand the “Display” tree.
  6. Expand the “Enable adaptive brightness” tree.
  7. Next, set “On battery” and “Plugged in” options to “Off“.
  8. Click on the “Ok” button to save changes.

The good thing about this method is that you can set enable or disable ambient sensor on per power plan basis. For example, you can enable the adaptive brightness on power-saving mode and disable it on high-performance mode.

Turn off adaptive brightness command

Windows has a dedicated single link command to fully turn off the adaptive brightness. This is especially helpful if you don’t want to dig through options or to create custom scripts or shortcuts.

  1. Open the command prompt as admin. You can do that by searching for in the Start menu and selecting the “Run as administrator” option.
  2. After opening the Command Prompt window, execute the below command. This will disable automatic brightness when running on battery.
    powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT 7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99 FBD9AA66-9553-4097-BA44-ED6E9D65EAB8 0
  3. Next, execute this command to disable it when connected to power.
    powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT 7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99 FBD9AA66-9553-4097-BA44-ED6E9D65EAB8 0
  4. Once the command has been successfully executed, close the Command Prompt window.

From now on, Windows will no longer change the brightness according to the outside light conditions. To enable the auto-brightness control, execute the same command while replacing “0” at the end of the commands with “1”.

That is all. It is that simple to fully disable ambient light brightness control in Windows 10. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible. For better control, you can use third-party apps to change desktop screen brightness.

2 thoughts on “How to Turn Off Windows 10 Adaptive Brightness (Fully Disable)”

  1. Avatar for Bill

    THANK YOU. My new Carbon X1 was driving me nuts when on battery with the screen growing dim and bright for no apparent reason (when on the battery). It is now fixed.

  2. Avatar for Capt Obvious

    Thanks for this! My new Inspiron has been driving me nuts with this insane “feature.” For reference, neither of the first two options is available on my system. However, the CLI version appears to have worked.

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