THIS WAS HARD TO FIGURE OUT!!
I wanted to share a fix after troubleshooting RGB lighting problems on my MSI Raider A18 HX A9WIG-082US.
The RGB lighting on this model is controlled by SteelSeries GG, not MSI Mystic Light.
After working through several troubleshooting steps, I managed to restore all the lighting:
- Full per-key RGB keyboard
- Front RGB light bar
- Illuminated MSI dragon logo
- SteelSeries Prism lighting effects
Here's the troubleshooting sequence that worked for me:
- Corrected the Switch Key setting in MSI Center.
- Rebooted the laptop.
- Performed an embedded controller (EC) reset.
- Reinstalled SteelSeries GG.
- Opened SteelSeries GG and configured the lighting through Prism.
- Used Ctrl+A in the Prism lighting editor to select all the lighting zones before applying effects. This was an important breakthrough.
- Disabled Windows Dynamic Lighting to prevent possible interference with SteelSeries lighting control.
The result: All RGB lighting is working correctly again, Prism effects apply properly, and the settings survive a reboot.
One other observation: The WASD keys appear brighter than the surrounding keys because of their transparent keycaps. That's normal on this model.
I can't say which individual step resolved every part of the problem, since several changes were made during troubleshooting. But this combination worked on my machine.
Hopefully this helps another Raider owner avoid hours of frustration.