Tuesday 7 February 2017

Fix non-adjustable brightness on AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series notebooks for Windows 10

If you have a notebook with Windows 10 that uses the AMD Radeon (Catalyst) graphics chipset, you may find that the default AMD video driver that is automatically installed by Windows does not support any brightness adjustment.

This means that the notebook battery will not last as long because it is always on full brightness.

This is a VERY common problem on Windows 10 notebooks with AMD graphics that have been re-installed, so you should always check that the brightness controls work after re-installing Windows or Windows drivers and for that matter, all the special control features (Fn keys, etc) on the notebook.

You can install the standard Microsoft Windows 10 VGA driver, but this reduces the maximum screen resolution (even though the brightness control does then work).

It turns out the solution is a simple registry fix.


1. Download the .reg file from here.
2. Double-click on the .reg file to install it
3. Reboot the notebook

The .reg file contains the registry fragment:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000]
"KMD_EnableBrightnessInterface2"=dword:00000000
"MD_EnableBrightnesslf2"=dword:00000000

Most notebooks will only contain one ControlSet (i.e. hardware configuration). If it does not work on your notebook, try changing ControlSet001 to CurrentControlSet.

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