T60 WS Flicker, with a twist (ed nematic?)

[Dodge DeBoulet]

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?