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jennysgotagun

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 25, 2009
10
0
Good news, pals. Decided to share :)

As for me, no other "feature" of Boot Camp on Macbook Pro is as annoying as the poorly coded keyboard backlight management. Today I found a program which finally fixed Boot Camp's buggy implementation for me (I use Boot Camp 3.1 / Windows 7 x64, mid-2009 MBP 15"). Software name is "Power Plan Assistant for Windows 7", so I'm unsure would this tool work on other MS systems. Here is the copy-paste of publisher's description (look at http://www.powerplan7.com):

Not a secret, Boot Camp's native Macbook Pro / Air keyboard backlight management has several issues. This becomes especially clear in comparison with Mac® OS X implementation: not only it's impossible (!) to disable keyboard backlight completely in Windows®, even worther thing is that Boot Camp's native automatic adjustment mechanism is not properly coded. It's, as a minimum, too sensitive, thus keyboard backlight tends to fluctuate even at a nearly constant level of ambient light. Being extremely bright, especially on the latest 'unibody' Macbooks, it doesn't only irritate user, but definitely is an extra energy consumer.

Power Plan Assistant brings the keyboard backlight management to a new level on Macbook Pro / Air, allowing the user to disable keyboard backlight completely or just disable / enable automatic keyboard backlight level adjustment. These features were previously available on Mac® OS X only. Power Plan Assistant brings them to both the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows®, at the same time preserving all of Boot Camp native hardware controls (no need to unload the 'Bootcamp.exe' process!)
 

rgarjr

macrumors 604
Apr 2, 2009
6,820
1,050
Southern California
Curious to see if this works as well..

I installed it on my Alu MB but the option to disable the keyboard light does not show up on the options there.
 

ssn637

macrumors 6502
Feb 12, 2009
452
48
Switzerland
Power Plan Assistant

Thanks for the tip!

I've just installed the assistant on my MacBook Pro (Windows 7 Ultimate in Boot Camp partition) and it works great! The assistant has a number of additional options, for example, allowing automatic power plan switching. However, when I resume the system from standby the keyboard backlight comes back on and I have to left-click the program's icon in the taskbar to turn it off again.
 

CocaCoca

macrumors newbie
Jan 29, 2010
25
0
Woot! Fyi it works great on Vista w. BootCamp 2.2! One of the Apple's favorite anti-Windows tricks on MBP now gone :D Kudos to creator of this amazing tool! PS Now it's time to find the tool that would tweak or replace the f****ng Apple trackpad driver lol
 

marikavs

macrumors member
Aug 6, 2006
74
0
XP Pro?

Has anybody found anything that works in BootCamped XP Pro? (I don't care about the trackpad, only the keyboard backlights.)
 
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