if you are here reading this post, most likely you have tried upgrading your good 5-year old asus N61 to windows 10, and was treated with a BLACK DARK BLANK screen? the problem is we are now treated with a generic AMD-ATI driver, instead of an ASUS customised one.
the generic driver is indeed working. the “trick” is to up your display brightness (Fn+F6), and you should find your LCD suddenly comes on!
took me 2 roll back to Windows 7 and reinstallation of Windows 10 in one day to confirm the above. happy windows 10-ing (:
Thank you – super easy solution – figured that it was driver related but would never have thoght of increasing the brightness as a fix. Clever!!
hi Klaus, thanks for dropping the note. glad it worked for you too! so easy and so unexpected indeed. cheers!
You are a genius. I have been wracking my brain over this for a week. Thank you for posting. Computer is up and running. Now on to the next problem. Great day!
hi Michelle, thanks for dropping by, and to leave the note. Am glad my suggested solution works for you too 🙂
All the best!
I have this model Asus and it is not responding to any key strokes.
WINDOWS 10 has failed for me, and there tech support is a joke!
hi Gavin, it’s sad to hear that it doesn’t work on the machine that you own. ASUS tech support is sort of bad for this model. I recall seeing limited drivers update after buying the machine. Not sure about other models though.
I’ve been messing around for a couple of days after upgrading to Windows 10 and using an external monitor before getting finding your solution which worked a treat. So simple but I never would have thought to try it.
hi Tony! great to hear from you from downunder. am glad the solution worked for you too, cheers!
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!!
I was going crazy!!!!
u are most welcome Enrique, cheers 😉
Hi, thank you for solving of a this problem, I am the same. Sorry but I couldn’t understand. Where is a generic AMD-ATI driver? I use now also windows 10 but brightness is always more then %70, others I get black screen. But it doesn’t effect if you increase or decrease a brightness. What is the solution I didn’t understand?
Hi Dumrul, the driver installed and running in Windows 10 is a generic driver for ATI chipsets. The only drivers customised by ASUS can be found here http://support.asus.com/Download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=n61Jq&p=3&os=30 It was 5 yrs ago when they released any customised drivers for our machine.
The ‘solution’ is for folks who installed Windows 10, met with a black screen, and do not know what to do. It looks like you have already found the ‘solution’ yourself? Cheers 😉
It is good to be able to see the screen… but it is not a complete solution since the brightness is too high for comfortable viewing.
hi subpixel, yup agree with that. guess this reflects very well on the level of after-sales support ASUS render for its products. could very well affect our decision on our next laptop purchase 😉
Thank you so much for posting this fix. I tried upgrading to Win 10 a month ago and got the blank screen upon reboot. Figured my laptop was bricked…
Booted back up today, laptop magically booted into Windows 7… I discovered this post, retried the Windows 10 upgrade, got the blank screen and hit fn+f6… Bingo!
Such an easy fix & a big money-saver, at that!
hi Rob, thanks for dropping the note. glad it worked for you too! Cheers 😉
I am surprised that no one noticed, the screen reaches only half the possible brightness. This issue actually led me to this blog.
hi Radek, thanks for sharing your observation. In my case, I noticed that my screen is set to MAXIMUM possible brightness. In other words, it’s totally dark, or maximum brightness. It’s a bit too bright for my eyes at times though :O
Thanks man you have saved so many people going crazy 🙂
hi Eray, thanks for the note. hope u have a good time with windows 10 too 😉
Absolute legend. Thanks for this. I was going to wait till microsoft fixed the bug eventually and just use my chromebook. I tried the things microsoft suggested but wasn’t going to reload windows 7 and upgrade 10 again. And you did it twice!! The sit back and relax comment as it is loading must of made you feel cheery. I expected they would come up with a fix eventually or laptop would dust away into oblivion. But you are the fixer. You rule TYH! Miscrosoft sux. They know they have this problem but still offer up FREE Windows 10 upgrade.
hi Alan, thanks for encouragement 🙂 personally i wouldn’t place the blame on microsoft. instead, ASUS is to be blamed here. i’ve owned and used multiple laptops, but N61jq is the only laptop that gave me the feeling of ASUS making the money, and forget about the consumers. take a look at the date of the last video card drivers released by ASUS for our laptop, and you will get what i meant. prior to windows 10, i have had similar issue with video card drivers when i attempted Windows 8 upgrade. yes, the same no display issue. but back then i din figure out if the solution herein would work for Win8.
am glad it worked for you! i had a brief experience with an Acer Chromebook. the 2GB RAM is not enough for my usage habit, and the chrome apps crashed very often. perhaps a chromebook with 4 to 8gb ram would work better? (:
Dude, you rock.
cheers 😉
You sir, are a hero.
no worries, thanks for dropping the note 😉
Seriously? Why is there so much praise for something that is NOT a fix? This isn’t close to a fix. This is a bandaid for a broken driver. You lose the ability to utilize battery saving power modes, and now you’re blinded by the light when in a dim-lit room. Thanks for nothing?
hi dave, so sorry to hear that the ‘fix’ doesn’t quite work for you. yes, until ASUS decides to publish an official driver (which is like never going to happen), this band-aid trick could work for those of us who are OK with the screen brightness. thanks once again for dropping the note. cheers (:
Hi Tyh,
I don’t know if it’s an ASUS issue, but it’s AMD’s for sure. Every driver AMD has published since the versions ASUS distributes has had the same problem. I spend 99% of my laptop time using linux and surprisingly since binary (AMD propietary) version 13.4 happens exactly the same: blank screen (null brightness). Haven’t been able to upgrade X server and lots of things because of this. Last time I tried to upgrade Fn+F6 didn’t do the trick.
So I’m not sure if AMD discontinued support to Radeon HD 5730 or forgot about LVDS connection but all drivers except the very firsts ones have the same outcome.
Probably ASUS should have reported and pushed AMD’s buttons but…
hi Porket,
it didn’t occur to me that the source of problem could be AMD. from a business point of view, i think it’s more profitable for both AMD and ASUS to focus their engineers’ time on latest products. supporting a chipset that is >12 mths old doesn’t sound very profitable to me. if what u said is true, all the more i will distance myself from AMD-related products if that’s their philosophy of support 😛
Hi TYH,
Thanks for this – I haven’t yet upgraded the N61JQ from Windows 7, but I always use it with an external VGA monitor anyway. After I upgrade to Win 10 and try your fix, will the external monitor also be at maximum brightness, or does that just apply to the laptop’s own screen? (I’m hoping that by using a monitor this driver bug won’t affect me, as I can just turn the monitor’s own brightness down anyway, right?)
hi! apologies but i couldn’t answer your qn cos i do not have an external monitor to test it. my guess is the external monitor won’t be affected as you believed too. if you try it, do let us/me know. cheers 😉
99,95% sure it won’t affect our external monitor. I’ve been using an external monitor via VGA and hdmi/DVI and never had a problem. External monitors usually have their own brightness controls 😉
Thanks Porket for dropping us the note to share your experience 😉
I can now confirm 100% that this is not an issue when using an external monitor. The N61Jq’s brightness control has no effect, except for controlling its own LCD screen.
I’m having a good result using my external monitor via HDMI, but not such a good result if connected via VGA cable – the monitor keeps on disconnecting and reconnecting itself all the time, to the point where it’s unusable.
I had this same issue under Windows 7 with the N61Jq when I tried to use any video driver above the version that came with VGA_ATI_Win7_64_868000.zip, so that is the version I stuck with. Unfortunately that version doesn’t let me install it under Win10.
YOU ARE AWESOME.
YOU ARE SUPER.
YOU ARE GENIUS.
thank you very much dude.
I haven’t yet done the deed (upgrade to Win10) but intend to try this weekend at the last opportunity. In the meantime I have been searching for articles like this one that I may need for help, and came across this, which looks like it’s a fix for the brightness issue:
https://community.amd.com/thread/184510 (Catalyst driver kills screen brightness control on Windows 10 (build 10240, RTM)
When you arrive there, search (Ctrl+F) for “hiigara 14-Sep-2015 19:27” (but without the quotation marks) and you will find the post with the registry fix.
I would copy/paste it here but as it’s not my solution I feel it’s better to post just the link, to give the OP there his rightful attribution 🙂 Hope it works, it seems to have worked for several people there.
OK, well I have upgraded to Win10 now, and tried the method described in the link I posted above, and I have to say that it didn’t work for me. In fact, setting the registry value to 0 stopped the screen from working completely! Fortunately I could still work via my HDMI external monitor, or it would have been most awkward. So I reversed the change and am now back to square 1.
I must say though, no-one else on that AMD forum has complained that it didn’t work, and perhaps it’s because the video driver version in use there was Catalyst 15.8, whereas in my Win10 it’s 15.201.1151.1008? Who knows…
hi Ralph, appreciate it for dropping by to share the experiences. looks like we could look forward to something working in the near future if it’s working on some configurations like you mentioned (no-one else complained). thanks once again (:
I orignally turned down the brightness from max as it was too bright. Would have never guess it was the cause of the error. I found your post very easily from a google search.
If the laptop freezes soon, next step is the camera and ethernet/wireless drivers.
Many thanks for your post.
I’ve known this for a long time. But that’s not enough for me. The LCD light annoys my eyes and I can’t dim it in Windows 10. It constantly shines the most light. this is so bad.
It is good if one can find a solution to control the amount of light.
5 years on and still, your article is applicable and saved me many hours of troubleshooting. Thanks!
cheers 🥂