Since the Acer Aspire R7's backlight is LED, it should be possible to make it much dimmer than the current minimum brightness offered. However, the current drivers only allow you to go to about 4x as bright as is comfortable when using the laptop in a dark room. This makes the backlit keyboard kind of silly - if it's bright enough that the minimum brightness isn't jarring, I can easily see the keys.
Not interested in an ergonomics debate here about using a laptop in a dark room - sometimes some users just want to use a laptop in a dark room.
If Acer could increase the overall brightness range so the minimum brightness is 25% of its current value, that would help a lot. Alternatively they could offer a tool where you set what the range should be (within the physically possible range).
The R7 is pretty bad in sunlight, but I assume that's nothing they can fix in software.
In the meantime I've been using one of many software dimmers:
http://www.nelsonpires.com/software/dimmer/
The description there misunderstands what the software does however - it basically just draws a dark box over most of the screen, except where the OS prevents it like context menus and the taskbar. It doesn't actually reduce the backlight brightness (and therefore, doesn't save you any battery). To get the battery savings and a uniform dimming, Acer would have to provide drivers with a wider brightness range.
