Adjusting screen brightness with shortcuts
A while ago I installed Windows 7 on my Sony laptop. The good thing about it is it runs quite stable and most things just work. The bad thing some of the shortcuts with the blue "Fn" key don't work anymore. Adjusting the volume works perfectly fine, but setting the brightness of the LCD backlight does not.
Since Sony is not going to release any Windows 7 64 bit drivers for my model, I finally decided to write a little programm myself. This took several hours of searching for the right API to use. There are actualy three different ones:
- The first API I tried is called the Monitor Configuration of the Win32 API but did not work for my laptop (some kind of I2C transmission error occured)
- The Backlight Control Interface using IOCTL was the first approach that worked for me, but getting the current brightness is not supported on newer Windows versions
- So I ended up using WMI which is available for .NET and works surprisingly quite well.
Further usage information and a downloadable binary can be found on my Projects page
If you encounter bugs or have any suggestions please do not hesitate and give some feedback.
… but how is it called in English?
English is not my mother tounge as you can surely guess. So I often have to translate some words from German to English and vica verse or look up words I don't know. I had a nice tool called Babylon Translator. It was just a trial version and ceased to work after the trial period. After living without a translation program for some years and having to look up words in online dictionaries I decided to write a translation program myself since I did not want to open my browser everytime I wanted to look up a word.
The result of a few C# programming hours was a little tool called Translator. At the moment it uses the dictionary at Leo.org to look up words maybe some more dictionaries will follow.
You can find the tool and source code here.
Have fun testing it and don't forget to give some feedback