T60 WS Flicker, with a twist (ed nematic?)
Posted: Sat May 12, 2007 9:56 am
When working in my home office, I normally have my T60 connected to an external Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u (now considered pretty ancient, but still works acceptably well). I run the Mits at 1280x1024, 75Hz refresh with the desktop spanned across both displays.
When I returned to my desk a little while ago and signed on, the external display did not wake up. I checked the display properties, and the display was still enabled, so I disabled and re-enabled it. That worked, and the external continued to work fine.
The same can't be said for the WSXGA+ display on T60, though; while it looked fine for the most part, every 30 seconds to 1 minute, I would see an annoying static-like flicker on it. The flicker did not occur on the Mits, only the laptop.
I tried a couple of things; turning off/on the external, re-applying the selected settings in the display properties in XP, and finally dinking around with the PowerPlay settings for the ATI driver.
The last thing seems to have had a positive effect; a setting that apparently allows the screen refresh rate to be lowered was checked, and I unchecked that. Since then, I haven't seen the flicker reoccur. My impression from the on-line help is that this setting would only have an effect when running on battery and the battery level had dropped below a certain threshold, but neither were true in this case.
This is the 2nd problem I've had with my T60 that included flaky video; the earlier issue was a complete, hard lockup of the laptop with a corrupted display on the laptop (external display was fine) that required a 5-second press of the power button to turn it off. At the time, I was running a a large number of applications (a 512MB VMWare guest, a J2EE-based app server, a Java GUI application design tool, MySQL 5 and its GUI Administrator and Query apps, Outlook, Firefox, GAIM, who knows what else). Not sure what happened there, but my suspicions are that it's video adapter related.
Any thoughts?
When I returned to my desk a little while ago and signed on, the external display did not wake up. I checked the display properties, and the display was still enabled, so I disabled and re-enabled it. That worked, and the external continued to work fine.
The same can't be said for the WSXGA+ display on T60, though; while it looked fine for the most part, every 30 seconds to 1 minute, I would see an annoying static-like flicker on it. The flicker did not occur on the Mits, only the laptop.
I tried a couple of things; turning off/on the external, re-applying the selected settings in the display properties in XP, and finally dinking around with the PowerPlay settings for the ATI driver.
The last thing seems to have had a positive effect; a setting that apparently allows the screen refresh rate to be lowered was checked, and I unchecked that. Since then, I haven't seen the flicker reoccur. My impression from the on-line help is that this setting would only have an effect when running on battery and the battery level had dropped below a certain threshold, but neither were true in this case.
This is the 2nd problem I've had with my T60 that included flaky video; the earlier issue was a complete, hard lockup of the laptop with a corrupted display on the laptop (external display was fine) that required a 5-second press of the power button to turn it off. At the time, I was running a a large number of applications (a 512MB VMWare guest, a J2EE-based app server, a Java GUI application design tool, MySQL 5 and its GUI Administrator and Query apps, Outlook, Firefox, GAIM, who knows what else). Not sure what happened there, but my suspicions are that it's video adapter related.
Any thoughts?