How to set up the keyboard backlight on an Acer laptop. Instructions: how to turn on the keyboard backlight on an Asus laptop. Keyboard key illumination principle
Keyboard backlighting is one of the necessary functions that allows you to work with a laptop in rooms with low lighting levels or in night Times of Day. This option has long moved from the category of “whims” and is increasingly taken into account when choosing device
How to turn on the backlight
Not all laptop owners know about the presence/absence of backlit keys on their laptops. To check, you must first pay attention on the top panel of the keyboard. Many manufacturers in the optional range " F1- F12 » add special functions, indicating them with the corresponding pictograms.
If there are no icons, then you can try the button combination “ Fn+ F1- F12 " It is worth considering the fact that in addition to backlighting, row “F” can also cause sleep mode or, for example, turn off the screen. If you mistakenly called the wrong action, it’s quite simple repeat the last combination and everything will return to its place again.
This option can also be called by the keyboard shortcut “ Fn+ space(space)" or " Fn+right arrow».
Turning the feature on or off depending on your model
Different brands and models of laptops differ in how they turn on the backlight, if any.
DIY lighting
If the manufacturer of your device does not provide backlighting, then there are two options to solve the problem - order ready or do with your own hands.
If for a desktop computer keyboard you can get creative and design both external and internal backlighting, then for a laptop you don’t have to choose. To illuminate the working panel of a laptop PC will be needed.
A modern gamer can play on anything, from a smartphone and tablet to a gaming console or a powerful desktop. At the same time, sometimes situations arise when it is necessary to get a gaming device that combines two seemingly mutually exclusive features - mobility and high graphical performance sufficient for current games. This is where gaming laptops come into the picture, which can act as both the main gaming system and a temporary workstation for those who need to constantly hone their gaming skills. It is this kind of device that we will talk about in our today’s review of the 17-inch gaming laptop MSI GT70.
The MSI GT70 laptop comes in a black cardboard box decorated with a stylized red dragon, which clearly indicates that this device is a gaming model.
On the surface of the packaging you can find references to the proprietary technologies used, as well as clarify the hardware characteristics of a specific configuration. The package includes a massive 180 W power supply, which weighs more than a kilogram.
Design, connectors
The MSI GT70 laptop is distinguished by a brutal design characteristic of gaming models and a solid thickness, which reaches 5.5 cm at the thickest point of the case. The body of the device is made of practical (partly smooth, partly rough) plastic, the lid and working panel are finished in metal and only in Around the keyboard you can find glossy exterior details. On average, the weight of this 17-inch gaming laptop is about 4 kg (depending on the specific hardware configuration), while the configuration we reviewed showed a result of 3.75 kg when weighed.
The middle part of the laptop lid is trimmed with a black metal sheet with a texture that imitates mechanical surface treatment with a hard brush. At the top there is a plastic panel with the same horizontally oriented texture. In the area of the hinge hinges, utilitarian rough plastic is used, and on the sides of the display unit there are two profiled parts with a smooth surface.
In the center of the lid you can find the MSI logo, which at first glance looks like an ordinary mirror overlay. However, as soon as you turn on the laptop, the brand name will be illuminated with milky white light.
The base of the MSI GT70 case has a rather complex shape and is made of plastic with a practical rough surface. The near part of the case is noticeably thinner than the back; the additional space is used by a powerful cooling system. In addition to standard legs and perforations for air intake, on the bottom of the laptop you can find a small subwoofer and a number of protrusions and stiffening ribs that help prevent the case from bending when there is too much pressure on the working panel. A removable battery with a capacity of 87 Wh is located in the front right side of the case. The upgrade hatch takes up almost three-quarters of the base of the case, and to get to the inside of the laptop, you have to unscrew about a dozen screws.
The pointed front edge of the MSI GT70 case contains a row of five indicators. On the right side you can find only two USB 2.0 ports and an optical drive. The left side is filled a little more densely; there are four separate audio ports, three USB 3.0 connectors, a full-size card reader and a massive “two-story” radiator for the processor cooling system.
It is significant that the creators of the laptop did not ignore the back edge of the case, on the extreme part of which they installed a radiator for the cooling system of the discrete video card, and in the center they placed a number of connectors, including three video outputs (HDMI, miniDisplayPort and D-sub), a network port RJ45, power supply socket and Kensington lock hole.
Ergonomics
The laptop lid can be easily opened with one hand, since even a fairly tight hinge cannot resist the weight of the massive base. The angle of inclination is noticeably wider than average, two massive wide hinges look quite reliable.
The edging of the 17-inch display made of matte plastic is visually divided into near and far parts, which visually somewhat conceals its dimensions. We cannot help but note the design solution of the webcam unit, which has transformed from a modest hole on the edge into a stylish diamond shape with glossy inserts along the edges and a mirror backing in the center.
The under-palm part of the MSI GT70 is finished with a sheet of metal with a horizontally oriented texture. Along the side edges of the working panel there are plastic linings, stylistically similar to the corresponding decorative elements on the laptop lid. The remaining space is completely occupied by a glossy panel, in the lower part of which there is an island keyboard, and in the upper part there are indicators and touch control buttons.
A fairly large touchpad with two separate buttons is noticeably recessed into the surface of the palm panel. The broken bottom part of these buttons is finished in silver-mirror plastic, a thin red line is applied directly above them, and the entire touchpad is edged with gloss black. The button to disable the touchpad is located in close proximity to it, under the left corner of the key Space.
Above the MSI GT70 keyboard there is a special panel, in the center of which you can see an ornately designed power key with red and white backlighting, and in the corners are silver speaker grilles from the Danish company Dynaudio. The remaining space is occupied by a pair of keyboard mode indicators Caps Lock and Num Lock and six backlit touch buttons.
The first launches the PowerDVD video player, the second forcibly activates the high-speed mode of the cooling system, and the third turns on the keyboard backlight. The next three buttons turn off the wireless modules, the screen backlight and launch the System Control Manager utility, respectively.
Keyboard, backlight
The creators of the MSI GT70 laptop decided not to experiment with the keyboard themselves, but used the developments of SteelSeries, a well-known manufacturer of gaming accessories. The result is a keyboard with soft-touch, textured keys that delivers excellent tactile characteristics that give you complete control over actuation timing and reduce hand fatigue during long gaming sessions.
But there are several questions about the layout: the key Win moved from left to right, and it is quite often used as part of shortcuts; the arrows are placed at the junction between the main and additional digital blocks, which makes it difficult to feel them blindly. And finally, the glossy backing looks quite attractive, but is completely impractical.
However, the main visual highlight of the MSI GT70 keyboard is the full-color LED backlight with three independent lighting zones and several operating modes. In the general case (Normal preset), you simply turn on the backlight with the touch key, the second touch leaves only the left part with the WASD gaming pad lit (Gaming preset) and the third turns off the glow again. The “plus” and “minus” keys on the additional keyboard allow you to adjust the brightness of the backlight, and as the brightness increases, the color intensity decreases and it becomes noticeably less saturated.
If you want to get more color and effects, then it's worth running the MSI Keyboard LED Manager utility. The “Dual Color” operating mode provides a smooth transition between two primary colors, for example, the “yellow-black” option looks simply great and looks more appropriate than ever. “Wave” smoothly rolls a wave of light from left to right between three zones, each of which can be assigned its own color. In “Breathing” mode, the backlight simulates breathing, and in “Audio” mode it lights up to the beat of the music, allowing you to throw a real party. “Gaming” leaves only the left side of the keyboard lit so as not to distract the player, while “Normal” allows you to customize the glow of each of the three zones, using seven primary colors and four shades for each of them.
Functionality
As befits any self-respecting gaming laptop, the MSI GT70 is equipped to the maximum. In particular, the configuration tested uses a powerful quad-core Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor with a maximum operating frequency of 3.4 GHz and an impressive heat dissipation of 47 W.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M
Intel HD Graphics 4600
To cope with such a “hot heart,” MSI engineers had to improve the proprietary Cooler Boost cooling system. In addition to two separate radiators and efficient fans, the new version of Cooler Boost 2 received a thermal bridge between the CPU and GPU cooling units, which in turn improved cooling by 15% and reduced system noise by 25%.
The integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 video core is useful only in office mode, but for real work, the most powerful gaming discrete video card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M with 3 GB of GDDR5 video memory is used (50% faster than the graphics of the previous generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M). For additional overclocking of the graphics subsystem, a proprietary MSI NOS development is used, which combines Cooler Boost 2.0 and Nvidia GPU boost 2.0 technologies and can simultaneously use power from the battery and the electrical network. Using this mode allows you to provide up to a 10% increase in performance in games compared to the standard operating mode of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M.
Four SODIMM slots are available for installing RAM in the MSI GT70, and in our case, three of them are filled with 4 GB slots each, which brings the total amount of RAM to 12 GB. In general, the data storage is built according to a hybrid scheme, in which a fast SSD is used as the system disk, and the actual data storage is entrusted to a capacious HDD. At the same time, proprietary Super RAID 2 technology allows you to combine up to three SSDs into a RAID 0 array, providing read/write speeds of up to 1500 MB/sec. Unfortunately, in the configuration under consideration it will not be possible to obtain such a speed, since it uses a single 750 GB HDD with a spindle speed of 7200 rpm (Hitachi HTS727575A9E364).
PCMark8 (conventional)
PCMark8 (accelerated)
Battery Eater (Classic / Reader's test)
The model is equipped with a 17.3-inch TN+film matrix with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and a non-glare matte surface. The brightness adjustment range extends from 1 to 285 cd/m2, which is sufficient for any ambient lighting conditions. Note that the MSI GT70 supports “matrix” mode, allowing you to display images on four displays simultaneously - three external via HDMI, miniDisplayPort and D-sub ports and one laptop’s own screen.
Resident Evil 6
BioShock Infinite (Average fps - 39.4)
We also note the proprietary MSI Killer DoubleShot technology, which allows you to provide the highest possible network connection speed for specific conditions via Wi-Fi and Ethernet; Sound Blaster Cinema surround sound system and increased charging current in MSI Super Charger USB connectors.
Video review of MSI GT70
Results
As a result, the MSI GT70 is a rather interesting gaming laptop, combining high system and graphics performance (Intel Core i7-4700MQ, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M), thoughtful gaming ergonomics (comfortable backlit keyboard from SteelSeries, high-quality acoustics from Dynaudio) and a whole range of unique proprietary technologies that significantly expand the basic functionality of the laptop. This entire list is quite expensive, but productive, ergonomic, high-quality and at the same time cheap gaming laptops do not yet exist in nature.
The product was provided for testing by ELKO, www.elko.kiev.ua
 | MSI GT702OC-618UA | MSI GT702OC-877UA Notify when on sale |
| Class | Laptop | Laptop |
| Design | Classical | Classical |
| Screen diagonal, inches | 17,3 | 17,3 |
| Matrix type | TN+film | TN+film |
| Screen covering type | matte | matte |
| Screen resolution | 1920×1080 | 1920×1080 |
| Touch screen | — | — |
| Processor type | Intel Core i7-4700MQ | Intel Core i7-4700MQ |
| Frequency, GHz | 2,4 | 2,4 |
| Pre-installed OS | Windows 8.1 | Windows 8 |
| Weight, kg | 3,9 | 3,9 |
| Dimensions, mm | 428x288x55 | 428x288x55 |
| Chipset | Intel HM87 | Intel HM87 |
| RAM capacity, GB | 16 | 8 |
| 32 | 32 | |
| Hard disk, GB | 1000 | 1000 |
| SSD, GB | 256 | 128 |
| Optical drive | Blu-ray | DVD-RW |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M, 3GB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M, 3GB GDDR5 | |
| External ports | 3xUSB 3.0, 2xUSB 2.0, VGA, HDMI(v1.4), headphone, mic-in, Line-in | |
| Expansion slot | — | — |
| Card reader | SDHC, SDXC | SD, SDHC, SDXC |
| WEB camera | + | + |
| Keyboard backlight | + | + |
| Housing material | no data | aluminum |
| Case color | black/black | black/black |
| Network adapter | 10/100/1000 | 10/100/1000 |
| Modem 56K | — | — |
| WiFi | 802.11 a/b/g/n | 802.11 b/g/n |
| WiMAX | — | — |
| Bluetooth | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| 3G | — | — |
| Battery capacity, mAh | no data | 7800 |
| Battery voltage, V | no data | no data |
How to turn off the keyboard backlight on a laptop? The keyboard backlight is a fairly useful feature that allows you to type even in complete darkness. The cost of a keyboard with this feature depends on the device manufacturer, additional functions and other innovations.
For most of these gadgets, it is not at all necessary to install drivers and other programs. Before purchasing, be sure to make sure that both English and Russian layouts are highlighted. This is very easy to do - just turn on the backlight and see what is highlighted.
Unlike personal computers, for which you can purchase a backlit keyboard separately, it is difficult to select an additional accessory for a laptop. Some manufacturers offer backlit keyboards for laptops; such a device can be purchased and replaced at a service center.
Before dealing with the problem of turning on the keyboard backlight, you need to make sure whether your laptop model even has it. Accordingly, if the computer is not equipped with this accessory, then you will have nothing to turn on.
Carefully read the specifications of the laptop and make sure this function is available. Typically, the keyboard backlight is indicated in the instructions that come with the laptop.
Turning on the backlight is easy - just press the Fn key along with another key. Which? This depends on your laptop model. The easiest method to determine the correct key is to visually inspect the function keys (F1–F12). This is where the equipment manufacturer puts additional symbols.
As a rule, turning the keyboard backlight on/off is indicated by a pattern in the form of a light bulb and keys or something similar. If you haven’t found such a picture, then you can search using simple manipulations: press Fn and the F1 to F12 keys alternately until the backlight starts working.
It is very important that these clicks do not activate other laptop options, such as going to sleep mode, turning off the display, and so on. Important! If you accidentally enable a function you don’t need, you can disable it using the same key combination - the main thing is not to press everything.
If the above method did not give any results, but you know for sure that your laptop is equipped with backlit keys, then you can use other key combinations. In this case, the following combination options can help you: Fn together with F6 and pressing the right arrow, or pressing Fn together with a spacebar.
If this does not help, then your laptop model either has a faulty backlight or does not have it at all. To find out exactly about this, we recommend consulting with the laptop manufacturer’s service center or laptop repair specialists.
Today, the backlight of a laptop keyboard is for many a determining factor in the purchase of this gadget. After all, this is a useful and convenient function for lovers of work and leisure at night or in poor lighting. But few users know how to turn on the keyboard backlight on a laptop and what can be done if this model does not have one.
How to set up the keyboard backlight on a laptop
It's worth noting that there are several ways to enable this useful feature. Differences exist depending on the manufacturer and the specific device model. Don’t forget that most budget models do not have such a useful feature, but don’t be lazy to check it again.
It is also possible to make the lighting yourself: all the parts can be bought in specialized stores. And then you will need a few simple operations. Or you can order a similar device from an online store - it won’t cost that much money.
How to turn on the keyboard backlight on a laptop
The first step is to determine whether your laptop has a keyboard backlight function. If it exists, then the whole process consists of pressing a special key combination. Each manufacturer in this case assigns its own button, but it must be located among the keys of the top row F1-F12. On them you can see special symbols printed in a different color (usually blue or red).
In order to turn on the keyboard backlight on a laptop (Acer, HP, Dell, Samsung, MSI and others), you need to hold the Fn button (located in the lower left corner) and press an additional key, unique for each manufacturer. For exact information, please refer to the user manual. It should be remembered that by experimenting with key combinations, you can disable or enable a number of other device functions (turn off WiFi mode, put the laptop into sleep mode, turn off the screen). You can undo changes by pressing the used keyboard shortcut again.
If you are sure that this function is available, but the desired combination does not enable it, then make sure that the Fn button works (for example, by trying another key combination you know). Check the availability of the appropriate drivers, BIOS settings (Setup Utility - System Configuration - Action Keys Mode - Enabled), try activating the button using the Fn+NumLock combination.
As already written, different manufacturers have different combinations for LEDs (we will give a few examples):
- How to turn on the lighting on an HP laptop - Fn+F5.
- How to turn on the lighting on an ASUS n76v laptop - there are three brightness levels, Fn+F3 and Fn+F4.
- How to turn on the keyboard lighting on a Lenovo laptop - Fn+Space (spacebar).
Plus, you can make external LEDs yourself. To do this, all you need is knowledge in the field of electronics, an LED, a resistor and a little time. However, it is worth considering that it is much easier and safer to purchase this accessory. After all, if you close the electrical circuit with the wrong side, then you will not only not achieve the desired result, but also risk damaging your computer.
As you can see for yourself, LEDs are an incredibly useful and convenient device. If you don't have it by default, you can always purchase additional hardware and also attach it to your laptop. And thanks to our tips, you can do this easily and quickly.
Modern models of keyboards for computers and laptops have such a feature as keyboard backlighting. It is very useful when you need to work at night. Thanks to the backlight, you can comfortably work in conditions of poor lighting without damaging your eyesight. Backlit laptops are often used by programmers and designers, most of whom mainly work at night, when no one can interfere with the creative impulse, and the presence of a good backlit laptop keyboard perfectly creates comfortable conditions for such work.
Let's look at options for turning on the keyboard backlight. The methods differ slightly depending on the laptop model or manufacturer. In order to turn on the backlight, you need to press and hold the Fn key and press one of the available additional keys on the laptop. Which key you need to press depends only on the laptop model. Usually such a combination can be visually identified. To make it easier to use a computer, manufacturers put certain symbols on additional keys (row F1 - F12). Typically, such symbols have the same color as the inscription on the Fn key, so turning on the keyboard backlight on a laptop will not be difficult.
Please note that by pressing some keys, various options may be activated, which may result in the monitor being turned off, sleep mode being activated, and other actions. In order to cancel this action, you must use the same combination again.
Creating a highlight
If your laptop does not have a keyboard backlight, you can create your own external key backlight. To do this, use USB power and one (several) white LEDs. Insert the two outer contacts (right and left) into the connector. The white LED has a supply voltage of 3.5 V. For this reason, a resistor is needed to absorb the extra 1.5 V. The LED current is 20 mA, or 0.02 A. Therefore, the resistance of the additional resistor is 1.5 V/0.02, which is equal to 75 Ohm.
If one LED is not enough, it is possible to connect another one with a similar resistor. The most important thing is to monitor the current consumed by the LEDs, since it will differ significantly from 18-20 mA - which as a result can have an extremely negative impact on the life of the LED.
Buying a Backlit Keyboard
One of the leaders in the production of backlit keyboards is Asus. A nice addition to the Asus keyboard is that it has an adjustable keyboard backlight, so you no longer have to bother your eyes searching for the right character in the dark. To turn on the backlight of the asus keyboard, there is a dedicated key that turns the backlight on and off. It can be located in the upper left corner of the keyboard. On how to turn on the backlight of an Asus keyboard of a particular model, you can see the attached user manual.