How To Add A Brightness Slider In Windows 10

Windows 10 has a brightness slider that’s buried deep inside the Power Options. Users normally use the function keys to manage screen brightness. The HUD on Windows 10 gives some idea as to how bright or dim your screen is. It’s been like this for ages. Even Windows 7 didn’t have brightness slider that was easily accessible for users. It too only had the one buried inside Power Options in the Control Panel. A slider is much easier to manage but out-of the box, there is no brightness slider in Windows 10 that you can easily manage. Win 10 Brightness Slider is a free, open source app that remedies that.

Win10 Brightness Slider is portable. You don’t need to install it. Just download the app, and run it. It will add a brightness icon to the system tray that fits in perfectly with the power/battery, WiFi, and volume controls.

Brightness Slider In Windows 10

Click the brightness icon and a slider will appear. You can drag the slider knob and increase or decrease the brightness. Like the volume slider in Windows 10, the brightness slider gives you numerical values for how dim or how bright your screen i.e., you have a scale that goes from 1 to 100.

Compared to the slider, the default Windows 10 brightness HUD doesn’t give you as fine a control. The function keys on your laptop control the HUD and they manage the brightness in fixed increments.

In the screenshot below, you can see the default brightness HUD on the left, and the slider that Win10 Brightness  Slider adds on the right. The slider is a lot easier to manage.

It’s actually a slight improvement on the Control Panel’s brightness slider because it gives you numerical values for the current brightness levels.

Limitations

While Win10 Brightness Slider works grea but it does have one limitation. If you use the brightness slider in Control Panel, or if you use the Function keys to change the brightness of your screen, the slider will not update to reflect the new brightness levels. It doesn’t interfere with the default brightness controls, and the default brightness controls do not prevent the app from working. The only limitation is that the app doesn’t update when you use the default controls to change screen brightness.

If however you use Win10 Brightness Slider to change the brightness of your screen, both the Control Panel slider and the Windows 10 default brightness HUD will reflect the new level that has been set.

You can run Win10 Brightness Slider on system startup. The app might show a ‘Not Supported’ error when you try to run it. If you get this error, the developer advises that you run the following command in PowerShell;

$monitor = Get-WmiObject -ns root/wmi -class wmiMonitorBrightNessMethods$monitor.WmiSetBrightness(80,10)

If that doesn’t work, your display drivers may need to be updated. Barring these two solutions, if the app doesn’t work there is no recourse for you.

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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