We are at our computers all hours of the day – so why doesn’t our screen brightness take this into account? If you’ve experienced lengthy computing sessions well into the night you are probably aware of the harshness of a brightly lit screen can have in an otherwise dimly lit room. Similarly, an afternoon sun can reek havoc on most any LCD display. Some monitors and laptops unfortunately lack any ability to adjust the brightness. Those that do, the interface or software as a whole is clunky and not intuitive enough for something you are changing routinely.

DimScreen is a portable utility that simplifies the entire process of screen dimming and brightening. Developed by the user Skrommel on the popular website donationcoder.com, the free program requires no installation and consists of just a single executable. On first execution DimScreen adjust the dimness to 50% with further adjusting available from the desktop tray, where the software resides. With a single right-click, the dimming can be adjusted from 0% – full brightness to 90% – almost completely black. If even that’s too much effort, keyboard shortcuts can be defined to increment or decrement dimness as desired; not unlike the shortcuts available for many laptop displays.

DimScreen is a no frills application that does one thing and and does it exceedingly well. While the problem it solves can be rather user-specific, the results are hard to argue.

Download DimScreen