Posted on: December 24th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve posted here.  It is actually pretty sad since my goal was to post at least once a week on an interesting topic back before the fall 2009 semester began.  Anyways, now that the semester is done, its time to move on and start working in new plans for my site, I will probably disclose these tomorrow sometime since I don’t want my blogs to be too long anymore   I will also probably discuss the last semester sometime within the next few days… it was a rough semester!

Today’s interesting topic relates to my personal HP Laptop (Tablet PC – tx1000 series).  More specifically Microsoft Windows User Access Control (UAC) and the graphics card in it.  If you own any computer or laptop with an NVidia GeForce 6150 graphics card in it, this will be incredibly useful to you.  So, the problem is: does your computer dim the screen and take forever to come back up?

If so, I have a solution… but first some background into the problem. Normally with any new operating system, I normally wait at least a year before I consider running it in a production environment (I’m quite conservative).  My tablet originally came with Windows Vista about a year ago, and I threw Vista out the first day I got it to put Windows XP on it.  I would never consider running Vista on any of my computers because of its horrible performance!  Windows XP served me well, but Microsoft recently stated that they wouldn’t be supporting XP anymore.  This coupled with a few really good reviews of Windows 7 prompted me to try Windows 7 when I first got it.

Back in late August, I got my hands on a copy of the Windows 7 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) and I installed it.  To my surprise, it seemed much better than Windows XP ever could be.  There were a few bugs, but nothing that I wouldn’t mind suffering through.  Of these bugs, the only major annoyance was the Nvidia 6150 dimming the screen for UAC (User Access Control) prompts.  I will get to that in a bit, but first, I want to make something very clear.  Windows 7 is the first operating system that I have ever ran in a production environment without it being fully released!  Microsoft should be very proud of themselves for making me feel safe while running a possibly unstable Windows 7.

The Windows 7 update software is quite impressive because it also found all of the missing drivers on my tablet and installed them for me.  Out of all of the drivers, it also got the latest Nvidia graphics driver for my card.  Prior to the driver being installed, UAC prompts and key combinations such as ctrl-alt-delete popped up the appropriate screen immediately.  After the driver installed, the screen would dim and then go blank for a good 10 seconds before it would come back up.  Back in August, I found no good solution to solve this but it was the only annoyance I had, so I decided to stick with Windows 7 for the college semester instead of doing a 10 minute restore of XP.

Now that I’ve got some background and some time in to solve the problem, the solution to this problem was quite simple.  For some reason, Windows 7 scales your computer screen and this takes longer to dim it due to the scaling problem.  To solve this, all you need to do is right click the desktop and goto the Nvidia Control Panel.  Click the advanced button and ok it.  Goto the “change flat panel scaling” option and turn it off entirely.  Once you ok this, your screen will now dim quickly (and properly).

Hopefully this will help someone else out because it was a big annoyance to me for a long 4 months!

Tags: 6150, dim, nvidia, tablet, uac
Posted in Mobile Technology
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