XPS 13 Dynamic Backlight Shenanigans

September 21, 2021  |  Hardware  ·  Laptops

I had a strange issue with my Dell laptop for a while: sometimes it would randomly mess with the display brightness whenever I moved my cursor. It was odd and curious, but it didn’t happen often enough to justify investigating.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally found the cause. Turns out, Dell has a feature called dynamic backlight control, and it doesn’t always work as intended. Fortunately, it can be disabled in the BIOS.