What are you thinking RIGHT NOW?

[Regulus]

I am insufficiently prepared to demonstrate the amount of caring that I don't do.

If there was anything I could do to make myself care, I'd do it—if, in fact, I actually cared enough.

[Carl]

Okay, so a cat I was really close to broke my laptop and clawed my face pretty bad for no reason... And I thought cleaning up all that crap earlier would be the downside of my day. Why the hell does this [censored] always happen to me?

[Regulus]

How exactly can a cat kill a computer?

[Carl]

I don't know, I left the room for a few minutes and came back to find him standing on it, a game had been open and was now minimized in a level, the screen is dark enough I could barely tell that much, another game had started installing, and nothing I have tried will fix the brightness at all. I can't see anything on the thing. I've found something that is supposed to help, but the brightness is set to maximum, I rolled back the display drivers, I updated them, I restarted the computer, more than once, I tried a restore point, nothing has worked. So the computer isn't per se broken because it still does stuff, just the screen is impossibly dark and I can't use it for art or games or anything really. It's hard to read or see anything, so I can't really use it at all until it's fixed... which I'm not sure how to do.

Edit: Okay I found a solution at last... sneaky creatures, cats. Frustrating at times...

[Regulus]

I have had that problem with my laptop. The LED backlight cuts off completely, and then it's damn near impossible to see anything. In my case, the solution was to do a restart. The solution to preventing it from happening again was to reinstall the OS. It's a Lenovo, and they're notorious for their brightness problems with Windows 7.

Since you said you found the solution... was it one of the function buttons? I bet that was it. Fn + F2 toggles the backlight on my PC. It's useful for saving battery life while taking notes in class, or making sure that no one can see what I'm doing if I leave my computer for a minute. xD

[Carl]

Mine's a Lenovo as well (apparently they're notorious for brightness issues on W8 and 8.1 as well...), but no, I had tried the function buttons. It took a lot of digging to discover that hitting F11 (brightness -) causes the problem, so the cat must have stepped on that key. Apparently with this model (IdeaPad P500) and one other (IdeaPad Z400) if you press F11, the screen will go way too dim and you won't be able to fix it by regular brightness adjustment means. I had to download the Lenovo Power Management Tool and old drivers for my graphics card in order to fix it.

[Regulus]

*pushes F11*

My laptop must be smarter than yours.

---



^ I've said that a hundred times before, but no one ever seems to get it.

[Arbystrider]

Makes me wonder if anyone on MLK owns a Thinkpad.

[Regulus]

^ Nope. Ideapad.

---

13,991 words for this one chapter, and I still have a bit more to add. Dear God, I'm crazy.

[Arbystrider]

I'm trying to rake up the funds for a Thinkpad X220t just so I can have a touchscreen computer to try out digital art, and also have something with decent specs and "enterprise-grade features".

I wonder what /g/'s opinion on the X220t is.