Inspiron, brightness buttons not working, #1

Hi Denisse G.,

Thanks for posting. Apologies that your system is not performing as expected.

1 Go into device manager and locate your display adapter

2 Right click on the display adapter and choose ‘Disable’:

  Temporarily disable the display adapter

  The screen resolution will change but do not worry about that

3 Now, re-enable your display adapter:

Try Now: Press Fn + F10 or F11

At first, my brightness button (F11) stopped working. When I press it, it takes me to a new window. I managed by going to the Settings every time to change the brightness. After a while, the brightness stopped changing all together, so, I followed the instructions above. Now, my brightness started changing again when I go to the settings but the keys are still not working. Also, my volume button doesn't change the volume but the 'find on page' (ctrl F) tab pops up. My laptop is pretty new so I don't know why I'm experiencing these problems.

Thank you for your message. Have you observed this issue after any recent Windows or driver update?

Hold down the Fn key & press F11 or F12 & check if the brightness changes through the keys.

What is the BIOS version installed?

Try using the on-screen keyboard & check if the issue persists.

This will help us diagnose if this is a hardware or a software issue.

For my reference, please click on the message tab next to your avatar– click “New Message” & search for my Dell username (Sreejith R) & send a private message with the service tag, registered name & email address.

How to locate the service tag

Thank you. Solved my problem too

using f11 and f12, brightness level does not change but bar changes. I have this problem in my previous Windows 8.1. Now I have installed windows 10 but problem does not solved. Also brightness does changes from control panel.

Product: vostro 14-3468

service tag:

Thank you for your message. Does other function key work like mute, increase or decrease sound through the Fn keys?

Please update the following drivers from Support Site

Dell Quickset Application
Intel HD Graphics driver
AMD Graphic Driver
BIOS

For my reference, please click on the message tab next to your avatar– click “New Message” & search for my Dell username (Sreejith R) & send a private message with the service tag, registered name & email address.         

How to locate the service tag

Sorry - can't help - I have an XPS 15 with an Intel HD 530 / NVIDIA GeForce with the same 23.20.16.4973 driver and it is working fine. 

The 5590 has an Intel UHD 620 - which windows used the 24 driver during a clean windows install, so there was no previous driver to roll back to. Download the latest 25, which did not help, and only going back to 23 fixed it for me.

I would say the better test is to use the brightness slider in Windows, settings as that eliminates any keyboard mapping problems with the function keys.

I did find other posts on the internet that the 23 version did not fix their problems.

a new bios update resolved the issue ! 

Hi, if you look at my previous post I had to use the driver starting 23 from the Dell website to get this working again.

Also updated to the latest bios.

Dont know if that helps

I recently had this problem with my Dell Inspirion 15 5000 Series, but as I was playing around with the keys, I discovered that by pressing the 'Esc' button at the same time with 'Fn', it will lock in 'Fn' so, you would not need to do anything extra to adjust brightness, volume or any 'F' key.