My keyboard begins to breathe without asking
After restarting my work computer due to an update, my keyboard suddenly starts to breathe. This is an annoyingly slow light-dark effect of the key lighting. You can usually only get the effect using the tax software, which seems untrustworthy to me, but which I haven’t installed at all. As a result, I can’t get rid of the effect with any keyboard shortcuts and it distracts me while programming all day long. The next day and a restart later it’s still like that, so I take care of it and find out that because there’s no documented key combination, I’ll have to install the control software to turn off the breathing effect there. Why it is so suddenly active remains unclear for the time being and I suspect that there is an undocumented hotkey that I accidentally activated. But at least switching it off via the software works and I’m happy to shut it down again. Unfortunately, the breathing effect is immediately active again and after further feeding the search engine of choice with the now familiar term “breathing effect” I find a trick: you have to shut down the software via the task manager, then the effect stops.
A little irritated, I put the topic aside and went back to working as usual with my red key lighting and not breathing or flashing.
A few days later I restart my laptop in the office due to the update and then the lighting on my identical keyboard simply switches off and can no longer be controlled using the brightness control key combination Fn+F7. You can easily tell that it’s not broken because it turns on as usual when you turn on the computer, but it turns off again as soon as Windows has loaded.
I already have an idea of what’s going on here, because I was pleased to learn some time ago that Microsoft is integrating the lighting control of various hardware directly into the Windows settings. I was mainly thinking about case fans, motherboards and graphics cards, but of course this also includes keyboard lighting. But for me it’s less aesthetic than ergonomic and that’s why I didn’t even have it on the same screen. Be that as it may, I find the relevant settings and my keyboard is listed there and I can regulate things there, even without an ounce of self-discipline. The labeling of the options doesn’t immediately make sense to me. For example, what exactly does “Use dynamic lighting on this device” mean? But I turn it off, restart the computer and my lights work again. Yay.
As I’m writing this down, I open the settings page again and the light is promptly off again. Closing the settings and unplugging and re-plugging the keyboard fixes this, even without restarting. Something hasn’t been implemented properly yet, because the other available settings such as brightness control simply don’t work and I’m offered the option of choosing the color of the lighting, even though my keyboard can only light up red. But I have hopes that it will happen and that in the distant future I will no longer have to install rancid junk software to control my computer lighting. Fortunately, the fans in my case also work without software with their calming and beautiful synchronous color changing, so I have little need for other wild setting options.
(Gregor Meyer)