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4 Posts
0
253055
January 6th, 2014 12:00
Latitude E7440 - Keyboard backlight not working
Hi all,
Unboxed an E7440 with the touch panel today. It came preloaded with Windows 7 Professional 64bit. After initial setup, e.g. user account creation, locale settings, etc..., I am unable to enable the keyboard backlight, and cannot find any driver updates via Dell, or special support packages.
The Fn-Right arrow key does nothing, all other Fn- work as expected.
Have I been delivered a lemon, or are there any specific drivers I can find (via the dell driver cabs or through the recovery partition image files ?) to check.
Of note: I also have a corporate E7440, identical HW configuration (no touch screen, only difference), with our corporate Win7 32bit image. The keyboard backlight on it works.
olive1969
4 Posts
0
February 26th, 2014 05:00
End of the story:
Dell sent a new keyboard. A subcontracted technician came onsite to replace it.
Opens the laptop: "Oh, your current keyboard is not correctly connected"
Reconnects the keyboard properly... backlight works.
This is a brilliant example of bad QA being done before the item ships...
Angela5
34 Posts
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January 6th, 2014 13:00
olive1969
4 Posts
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January 6th, 2014 14:00
Nothing connected via USB. This system was built on Dec. 20th, delivered & booted on Jan 6th.
The issue occurs either on battery, or on AC.
Not to mention that this is the built-in LAPTOP KEYBOARD with a BACKLIGHT. This is the only Fn+xx key combo not working.
So it's either a SW misconfiguration (which would be a shame on a system imaged by Dell itself...) or the hardware itself is faulty (bad news on a freshly built system...).
How can I diagnose & exclude if this is software related ? The keyboard backlight is not working on a totally clean install, e.g. nothing added or removed from Dell's image/setup.
giraffe_hunter
1 Message
0
January 12th, 2014 06:00
I don't have one in front of me so I cannot tell you exactly where to look, but when one of my users complained about the backlight not working I found it was disabled from the factory in the BIOS.
olive1969
4 Posts
0
January 14th, 2014 00:00
There's no option in the BIOS (in the "original", previous, or freshly updated version) regarding the backlight.
Dell is sending over a new backlit keyboard & a technician to change it, as it seems the wrong keyboard was included in my build...
Shame that this can happen when selecting a pre-configured system that explicitly mentions a backlit keyboard (and cannot be changed) in it's configuration.