Once in a while, we all leave our lairs to use the laptop in alien environments commonly known as the “outdoors”. One of the forces of evil we face outdoors is of course the sun who wrecks havoc on our fragile LCD displays.

One of the new subsystems Windows 7 adds are sensors, creatively called “Windows Sensors”. Through this, Windows 7 will add native support for light sensors where it can help optimize the user experience based on the amount of ambient light in both the operating system and third-party applications.

The cornerstone of this new subsystem is native support for ambient light sensors (ALS) through a generic class driver. Many laptops today already ship with ALS, for example the new Dell Latitude E-series, however all of them require a manufacturer-specific driver. The new class driver in Windows 7 will enable OEMs to just connect the ALS and not worry about drivers.

At the most basic level, Windows 7 has the “adaptive brightness” feature built into the operating system. Whereas Dell ships its own application today for Vista,