If we are users who spend long hours in front of our computer screen both day and night, it never hurts to take preventive measures to take care of the health of our eyes. We can do this by controlling the brightness of the monitor screen, as this must vary depending on the schedule and the lighting conditions that we have at all times. To help us take care of the health of our eyes we can use a free program like Dimmer , which we will talk about below.
And it is that visual fatigue is one of the big problems that we usually suffer from users who use our computer constantly throughout the day. That is why it is convenient to have the brightness of our screen well regulated. During the day, more clearly, the brightness should be higher, while, at night, as the brightness falls, we must reduce it as much as possible, so that we can avoid visual fatigue in our eyes.
When working with a laptop it is likely that we have function keys on our keyboard. With them we can raise or lower the brightness of our screen, we can even adjust it from the Control Panel within the power options.
On the other hand, if you work with a desktop computer, the monitor works independently , we will have to resort to the controls incorporated in the monitor so that we can adjust the brightness of it. If we want to avoid these options, we can regulate the brightness of the screen between different levels and ensure that our eyes do not feel discomfort is what we are going to achieve with the help of the following application.
Adjust the brightness of one or more screens with Dimmer
Dimmer is a small free application for Windows that has been expressly designed to control the brightness of the screen of our laptop or the external monitor of our computer. This software will be very useful for us to easily adjust the brightness of the screen, being able to dim it when darkness prevails and the brightness is too high.
This application is compatible with various types of backlighting such as LCD, TFT and LED , and we can even use it on our old CRT . In addition, it supports multiple screens, displays and monitors, through practical controls with which you can adjust each one individually. Dimmer has been designed to run on all versions of Windows, it is extremely easy to use, as well as intuitive and very light, making it ideal for everyday use.
Use the Screens tab to adjust the brightness
When we launch the application, a small window with a dark background will appear, very discreet and simple. In it we can see three tabs, although only two will be useful: Screens and Options. The first one that we find by default is “Screens” , where we can see a bar to configure the brightness of our monitor from 0 to 100, with 0 being the maximum brightness value and 100 being the darkest. In the event that we have several monitors connected, a bar will appear for each of them, so that we can configure them individually.
Once we have adjusted the brightness, we can click on the “X” icon located in the upper right part of the window to close it. Later, the application will remain running in the background and will move to the taskbar. From there, we can launch it when we need it again. The brightness level that we have chosen will be preset so that if we run it again it will show the brightness level that we used the last time.
The Options tab allows some minimal configuration
The next tab is the “Options” tab, where we can find some configuration options that we can enable or disable. To do this, we must check the corresponding box, although they are not too important. In it we can activate the possibility of starting the program after each restart of the computer, make the window not dimmable or always activate it in a minimized way.
How can we verify this is a very simple application, perhaps too much for some users. With it we do not have options such as controlling the brightness automatically since we will have to do it manually ourselves. For this reason, it does not offer us the possibility of controlling the temperature or the adaptation speed, by means of which we determine how quickly the brightness changes.
Download Dimmer
Dimmer is a free application completely free of spyware or malware, which we can download from the developer’s website . It is compatible with all versions of Windows and very light, since it barely occupies 96 kbs . In addition, it hardly consumes resources of our system so it can be used in all types of computers, even those older and less powerful.
This utility does not require installation either, as it is a portable program . This means that we can run it from any external device such as a hard drive, a pendrive or memory card. The program is responsible for storing our settings in a file in the program folder, so that you do not need to use the Windows Registry . Once we no longer need it, just delete the folder.
Although the developer released its first version in March 2007 , it was a bit abandoned, until last June the author decided to update it again. Subsequently, since last July 31, its new version 2.0.0.b8 has been available, which shows the determination of the author to keep the application up to date, solving errors and improving its use.
Alternatives to Dimmer
If we are looking for a tool with which to control the brightness of the monitor screen, but Dimmer seems too simple a tool and lacking in options, we must not lose sight of these two alternatives.
Gammy
It is a small application with which we can adapt the brightness of our computer screen. This can be done depending on the lighting conditions at all times in a completely automatic way, raising or lowering the brightness in the different screens and programs that we use. The application is compatible with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, as well as Linux and we can download it for free from its website .
F.lux
This small but powerful application is able to recognize what time of day we are. This is possible thanks to its location service, which allows you to gradually modify the brightness of our monitor. That is why this application will adapt the brightness according to the hours of the day, thereby helping to avoid visual fatigue. F.lux is a free and multiplatform application that we can download from its official website .
