Powers Unfiltered

I have a better-than-usual relationship with my current laptop — a Dell Lattitude D610.  It’s my one work machine — at the office, at home, on planes, at conferences, etc.  It’s a year-old, right-down-the-middle combination of fast-enough and light-enough and nice-enough-screen to be a good place to put my work life.  It’s been very reliable (ok, I guess that proves I’m not superstitious), and on top of all that it has had very, very good battery life.

But one way it likes to achieve that very, very good battery life is to dim the screen instantly whenever it is unplugged from AC power.  This is fine in the office — if I care, I can just move my power cord — but sometimes annoying on planes, and often annoying at home.  Today, for example, I took it outside while I was half-watching my kids play in the pool — and of course, it’s too dim to see very well, even in the shade, on a bright sunny day. 

On at least four or five occassions in the past, I have looked in the control panel for power management, and the control panel for display, and deep inside device manager, and all over the place without finding a way to control screen brightness.  So today I finally asked for help.  I Googled a few combinations of D610, power, dim, brightness, battery, etc., and in a minute or two found an answer on a Dell forum:  power all the way down, restart, go to the bios, jump through a bunch of hoops, and voila.  “Stupid that you have to do all that,” thought I, “but I suppose . . .” 

As I was contemplating the number of programs I had open, weighing all the work I’d have to save before shutting down, and the stupidity of having to go through this nonsense just to control screen brightness, I chanced to see the NEXT entry in the same forum:

Alternatively, you can also change the brightness while the system is up and running by pressing the Fn and up or down arrow.  This will change the brightness on both AC and battery power, depending on what the system is running on at the time you adjust it.

And sure enough, there on my up and down arrow keys are little blue icons that look for all the world like “brightness up” and “brightness down” symbols, right where they’ve been for a year.  So not only does it pay to ask for help, it pays to listen to more than one answer. 

I have been thinking about what this means about how we as designers of products hit the right balance of usability, documentation, feature set, and so on — not to mention how we as users of products decide where to spend our efforts on improving our own experiences with a product (or not). 

But mostly, I’m glad it’s easy to ask for help, I’m glad there are folks out there willing to provide help, and I should quit being so bullheaded and take advantage of the resources available. 

And — look for more outdoor posting ahead.