How do I disable Vari-Bright (atibtmon.exe) without Catalyst Control Center?

Question

Related to: When AC Power is disconnected, atibtmon.exe throws a Runtime error

I have a very similar configuration, ATI mobility Radeon HD 3670 on Dell XPS Studio 16 using Windows 7 64-bit, and have the same problem of atibtmon.exe throwing an error every time power is removed. The difference is, I do not have Catalyst Control Center installed and wish to avoid it as much as possible. It's a memory and CPU hog, and tends to leave corrupt installations which make deinstallation or upgrading a pain. So, I'm trying to find a way to do this directly, by whatever means CCC internally does it.

After some ack-ing and some googling, it looked like all I needed was to set a registry key PP_VariBrightFeatureEnable to 0. However, I've searched the registry all over (even with some regex-fu on Regalyzer ), but haven't been able to find such a key. I don't know where it's supposed to be so I'm unable to add it manually either.

Does anyone know the correct way to do this? The setup's .inf files have the string :HKR,, PP_VariBrightFeatureEnable which looks like the key goes somewhere under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (I'm assuming they're using an unconventional abbreviation of this one), but I'm not sure where exactly or even whether this interpretation is correct.

Solution

I added a value to the registry to this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000

The value name is PP_VariBrightFeatureEnable with the value type of DWORD and value 0x00000000.

Even though the value hadn't existed before, the brightness was constant after computer restart.

Hope this helps.

Comments

[Sundar R]

Thanks. I'd gone with the ugly hack of changing the atibtmon.exe's filename to something else, this is much cleaner. I'll try it out on my system after a restart.

[Isaac]

The post specifically says "without Catalyst Control Center"