Software to reduce brightness of laptop screen

The screen on my Windows 7 x64 laptop is too bright for my eyes at night, even at the lowest useful driver settings. I've tried different programs to reduce screen brightness. The only acceptable solution that I found is Dark Screen (hxxp://www.fxc.btinternet.co.uk/assistive.htm). A number of AVs at Jotti flag the Dark Screen installer as adware, but I believe that those are false positives. I've sent the installer to a few malware analysis sites; no suspicious behavior occurred. Nonetheless, to err on the side of caution, I ran the setup program in a virtual machine and used only the resulting portable executable, which is rated clean by all of the AVs at Jotti and did nothing suspicious at the malware analysis sites that I uploaded it to. If anybody wants, I can upload this portable executable to a file host.

Other software that I tried:
ssOverlay - similar to Dark Screen but doesn't darken all windows
DimScreen - similar to Dark Screen but doesn't darken all windows
Desktop Lighter - apparently adjusts gamma
Dimmer - got an error if I recall correctly
F.Lux - adjusts color temperature according to time of day

F.Lux can probably be used in conjunction with Dark Screen if desired.

 

do you have an ati graphics card or nvidia graphics card in your labtop?

in the control panel you should be able to lower the brightness throug there.

 

I was wondering just about this too.

 

I use f.lux.

 

Correct.

@wutsup
I've also used the brightness, contrast, and gamma settings in the Intel Graphics and Media control panel applet, but I couldn't get satisfactory results for night use.

 

I submitted the Dark Screen installer to Avira and got the result "Known clean."

 

I have the same problem as MrBrian but I did not even know that there is software which can reduce brightness. That are good news. Thank you for opening this thread, MrBrian.

Concerning "Dark Screen", I won't try it: At Virus Total 21 of 43 scanners regard it as dangerous. That's by far too heavy for me.

But just now I tried "f.lux" and it seems to be a nice program. (Thank you too, "The Seeker", for the information about it.)