How to stop 9300 LCD from dimming when on battery
As someone else posted, use the blue Fn key plus up arrow or down arrow to brighten or dim the display. The good thing is that you can dim the display to a still-acceptable level to get more battery life if that's important.
All, I've purchased fully 2-3 dozen used Dell systems off of ebay both for myself and others and using moderate to extreme caution...
There are other handy Fn key combinations. Fn + Page Up and Down control volume, Fn + End mutes the volume.
I have a Inspiron 9300 which runs a wide variety of games with a high frame-rate. However, it displays an annoying tendency to "pause...
Fn + F2 toggles wireless on and off.
Fn + Esc puts the laptop in Stand by mode.
Other things I do to conserve battery...
- I put the blank screen saver shortcut on my quick launch bar so I can quickly go into screen saver mode.
- I have a power setting of ! M A X B A T T E R Y (easy to see when spaces are part of the description) that shuts the display off after 1 minute and hard disk off after 3 minutes.
- My desktop background is black. I don't know if that saves battery or not, but I would think that a black desktop would use less power than a blue one or one with a green meadow (XP default).
My power settings are also set so that if I close my laptop it "does nothing", i.e. it doesn't go into Stand by. Closing the laptop turns off the screen so it's an easy way to save battery life especially if you know you won't need to use it for a while.
Using those techniques and others, I can come out of a two hour meeting with 85% left on my battery (630m high capacity).
Journey
Inspiron 9300 "Jerky" gameplay
alt.sys.dell talk from Newsgroups.