I have a HP EliteBook laptop that caused me a bit of head-scratching today. The inbuilt display had become quite bright, with low contrast, and was difficult to see unless I was directly in front of the display. Adjusting the brightness down made things worse as the contrast became very low. Looking at the screen, it was as though my glasses had fogged over.
I started trawling through all the possible Windows settings for the display, color profile settings, color calibration wizard, as well as the Intel graphics control panel settings. None of this improved matters. Googling for an answer didn’t help as it only suggested things I’d already tried. I was just about to conclude that the display had some kind of hardware failure, when I noticed an icon on the F2 key (next to the brightness down/up keys) that I didn’t recognise. What does that key do??
On clicking the button, the display is back to normal. Hurray!
Unknown to me before now, that button toggles the HP Sure View feature, which is supposed to be a privacy guard feature that makes the display hard to read by someone sitting beside you. (I say ‘supposed to be’ because it makes the screen so irritating to look at that users will quickly switch it off again.)
It was somewhat annoying to discover that what is supposed to be a feature, when activated accidentally is indistinguishable from a hardware failure. What would have been better if HP had done something like what Microsoft does with their Sticky Keys feature, where if you accidentally try to activate it (by pressing the Shift Key 5 times) it
- Explains the feature.
- Gives you the option to enable it, or cancel.
- Tells you how to disable the warning in future, if that’s what you’d like to do.
