Display Brightness

Display Brightness is a feather-light and portable application that displays your notebook's current brightness level in the systray area.

Hardware and software requirements

Before proceeding any further, you should know that it doesn't implement options for making any monitor adjustments, so you can either use the Windows built-in function or resort to another program capable of that task. Moreover, it only works if you have a laptop with display brightness programmable via WMI, running Windows Vista or 7.

View your laptop's display brightness

Once launched, the utility creates an icon in the taskbar notifications area and sits there silently, without any interruptions. It automatically identifies and displays the actual brightness level inside the icon, as well as on mouse hover.
By right-clicking the tray icon, you can bring up a small menu to suspend hotkeys or to pause the script. This way, you don't have to exit it. There are no other notable settings available.

No installation required

The tool's not wrapped in a setup package, so you can save the downloaded files to a preferred directory on the disk or copy them to a USB flash drive to carry it with you whenever you're on the move. It doesn't make any changes to the system registry, or create files on the disk without asking for your permission.

Evaluation and conclusion

It worked smoothly in our evaluation, without triggering the operating system to hang, crash or indicate error messages. It didn't put a strain on the computer's performance, running on a low amount of CPU and RAM.
On the other hand, Display Brightness doesn't make room for customization when it comes to advanced options or configuration settings for experienced users. We must also keep in mind that it hasn't received updates for a long time.