Free Monitor Manager review

Martin Brinkmann
May 30, 2017
Software
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3

Free Monitor Manager is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices that you may use to manage basic display related settings.

Most monitors come with options to change display settings such as the display's brightness or contrast. While that is the case, screens attached to computers, to laptops for instance, may not offer these hardware controls.

This means that users have to rely on third-party software, the controls provided by the operating system, or video card software, to manage these settings.

Windows 10 user may change the display brightness under Settings > System > Display for instance.

Free Monitor Manager

free monitor manager

Free Monitor Manager is a portable program that you can run from any location on the system. The interface displays all the functionality that the program has to offer.

The Brightness, Contrast, Red, Green and Blue sliders show the current value in percent. You may use the slider to increase or decrease the value of a particular option. Any change is reflected directly on the screen so that you can adjust it.

The program supports multi-monitor systems, and will detect any monitor connected to the computer system. Simply click on the monitor menu to select a different monitor that is connected at the time.

This allows you to change the values for that monitor without affecting any other monitors.

The only other feature that Free Monitor Manager supports lets you save data to profiles. This provides you with options to switch between different values faster, as you have to select one of the profiles only to do so.

The settings icon is tiny, and you may overlook it easily as it is placed directly next to the help icon in the lower right corner of the screen.

You will notice however that all but two settings are reserved to paying customers. All you can do there is to enable the "start with Windows" option, and to change the interface language.

The features that are not free are options to switch between profiles using the mouse, change value using global hotkeys or when applications are activated. The latter option allows you to change the monitor's brightness or contrast when you play a movie or start a photo editor for instance.

Verdict

Free Monitor Manager is a useful program for Windows devices and monitors that don't offer hardware controls to manage the supported values. It may also improve controls on multi-monitor systems, as you may control them all from a single interface.

 

Summary
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Author Rating
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4 based on 7 votes
Software Name
Free Monitor Manager
Operating System
Windows
Software Category
Administration
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Comments

  1. Manuel said on June 1, 2017 at 3:41 pm
    Reply

    Im using ClickMonitorDDC 3.6 from http://clickmonitorddc.bplaced.net
    and it works smoothly for me, no blocking,
    there is support for warm, cold color-profiles, but it is named 6500K and so on,
    ClickMonitorDDC supports so called command-lines with many possible parameters,
    this way you can create very flexible profiles.

    I had a look at freemonitormanager, it works, but I stay with ClickMonitorDDC,
    because it is perfectly optimized for fastest usage.
    You do not have to grab und move sliders, you simply click buttons, but there are sliders too :-)
    or you simply use mouse-wheel over the notification icon in taskbar,
    these notification-icons are awesome, because they always show the actual monitor-values,
    or use hotkeys, also working in fullscreen-games.
    ClickMonitorDDC is totally flexible and free,
    and there are still a lot of features, I do not use,
    day/night timer and so on

  2. Ben said on May 31, 2017 at 11:06 am
    Reply

    Nice. I always wanted to set the brightness of my monitor via software easily. It’s so annoying that you cannot do that on a normal PC easily.
    Thank you.

    1. Elias Fotinis said on May 31, 2017 at 12:56 pm
      Reply

      Yeah, every monitor program I’ve used is finicky at best. I’m currently using Dell Display Manager (free with Dell monitors), which has a pretty extensive command line interface, but the GUI is sometimes slow. When restoring from sleep it’s slow to detect the monitor, the controls are currently tiny and seem to grow and shrink with every update, and the window sometimes closes automatically and sometimes it doesn’t.

      Another one I’ve used is ClickMonitorDDC (portable & freeware) which was OK, but not perfect. First, it doesn’t support preset modes (Warm, Cool, Movie, etc.), but I guess that only possible with the OEM utility anyway. What’s more, it locks the GUI momentarily when changing something, making the brightness/contrast/etc sliders almost unusable (that’s because the Monitor APIs in Windows block for 40-100msec when called and should be handled in a background thread, but I digress…)

      I’m still in the lookout for a decent lightweight & freeware monitor manager. I once started writing one with nifty controls, global hotkeys, monitor grouping and TV-like translucent OSD, but I gave up. Maybe I should it pick it up again? :D

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