x120e Flickering

[anomalyconcept]

I too have experienced the flickering lines on the screen.  I have yet to determine a way to reliably reproduce the issue, but as others have said, it appears to occur most often after the computer has been powered on for a while and sitting idle.

I've had some luck in inducing the flickering lines by using the Catalyst Control Center (ccc) and changing the screen refresh rate and by enabling and disabling the 'LCD overdrive'.  Both of these actions appear to exercise low level hardware features; could this be the cause of the flickering lines?  For instance, the lines aren't always pure white or black; I've seen lines which had a gap very similar to the width of the Windows start button orb or the width of an icon.  Maybe it's displaying some data from another row in the framebuffer or some other graphics memory issue?

I'm curious as to whether the flickering lines occur only on the Windows desktop, i.e. in the Aero desktop window manager. I've seen the issue with both maxmized and non-maxmized windows, and the lines disappear and reappear toggling between the original window state and maximized/windowed.

Some things that I want to test:

full screen 3d application such as a game or certain media players (exercises OpenGL or DirectDraw/3D)

Aero vs. Basic mode

APU temperature

[anomalyconcept]

I wonder if this has to do with memory usage. I had a ton of Chrome windows open (90+ processes, 67% physical memory usage) and was closing groups of them. When I closed the last one, the screen also turned off and powered back on with the on-screen display showing my screen brightness and I had black horizontal lines.

Now I have intermittent white lines (non-continuous) going about as far as the right edge of the active window. The lines I experience are almost always on the right side of the screen and never stretch all the way across, usually only about to an edge of a window. This is why I suspect it could be an issue with the hardware and how the window compositing works.

I will try the latest AMD drivers to see how they behave.

[charlesdarwin]

OK this is driving me nuts. I bought an x120e about a month ago and for a while it was fine. About two weeks ago I started getting flickering lines occosionally, and it was inconsistent. Sometimes I use it for days and get no issue. Sometimes it starts doing that randomly and I can't get it to stop without rebooting. It drives me nuts. It just happened and I noticed that if I maximize a window (ex. chrome) it IMMEDIATELY starts doing that. I switched to a VGA monitor (disabled the internal one) and got the exact same thing, immediately continuing. I also tried closing and opening the lid (I have it set to do nothing when I close it, so the scren just turns off). But if the window is NOT maximized, it does NOT happen at all.

I have the ati 11.5 drivers from their site. I have the 2GB stock RAM and 2GB g.skill 1333MHz ram and the E350 CPU. I disabled Vari-Bright soon after getting the system, as it would change the screen brightness annoyingly when I worked (perhaps shifting my position caused the light sensor to detect a different amount of light). After reading some of these posts, I also disabled PowerPlay. Do you guys have any suggestions here?

Note: I just shut the laptop down, unplugged it and removed the battery for a moment, then put them back in and started windows. I maximized chrome and it is not happening right now. I'm sure it'll come back randomly though.

I read that UAC prompts can cause this, but I don't think I had one when that started. I'm on the balanced power plan. I installed SP1, and I'm running windows 7 home premium 64-bit. I'm running the latest BIOS update. I am NOT using aero transparency, opaque is enough for me.

The only third party things in/connected to the laptop are the g.skill ram and a logitech v220 usb mouse.

I tried dimming/making the screen lighter and it makes absolutely no difference - the flickering lines continue exactly the same. This has happened when the laptop was on battery and when it was plugged in (most recently I had it plugged in when it happened).

HELP!

oh btw I'm was thinking about reinstalling windows with my own disc since there may be reminants of some lenovo utilties that didn't seem very useful and I removed right after getting the machine. Should I go ahead and do so?

[anomalyconcept]

My experience is very similar to yours except that I rarely maximize any of my windows. I recently installed Firefox again and have been using that (seems to use less memory and doesn't crash when having tons of tabs open, for some reason) as well as updating to the 11.5 Catalyst drivers and haven't yet seen the issue.

The commonality that I'm seeing is whenever the screen goes for a full redraw- UAC prompt, maximize window, video playing- the issue either appears or goes away. My educated WAG is still on some memory/video buffer/compositing issue.

[charlesdarwin]

But I think that it has to redraw if I close the lid (that's set to do nothing), as the screen is turned off. I think. But the issue instantly continues as soon as I reopen it. And you'd think that changing to an external monitor and disabling the internal one would force a redraw, which I think it does. But the issue continues. odd that UAC doesn't do that. I doubt maximizing a window forces an entire redraw - it doesn't take a moment, unlike all the other things. It's also so odd that rebooting fixes it. I left the machine on for a few hours to get it warmed up, lid closed, then used it and had absolutely no issues. Strange...

[JameZ]

@All,

I am sorry to say that we have to look for volunteer for this issue as the engineering team weren't able to replicate the issue after the BIOS fix therefore we are unable to proceed to send it to development to investigate further.

They would need a X120e system which is causing this issue before they can fully diagnose the problem.

So if anyone who is willing in the US is able to volunteer their X120e, I would greatly appreciate it as we can proceed to diagnose this issue further.

Drop me a PM if you are ok with it and I will proceed to get the shipping arrangement done.

//JameZ

[drskhan]

Dear Lenovo Expertise,

I recently purchased Lenovo X120e. Only 1 month old.

Recently it started "flickering" line that sometimes appear & then disappears.

Pls advise.

Dr. Shahzad

[baalho]

Edit:

Updated to SP1 and new Bios. Will test some more.

Lets hope the problem is gone. 

[Mutato]

Has a solutiuon been found? Have a client that has multiple units with this issue. Updated the video drivers to the latest version on system update. (8.813.4.0) The test unit had 8.1 on it with the issue. So far I have not seen the issue surface yet since the update. been about 12 hours since update.

[wildone81]

Like it was discussed earlier in the thread, if you have access to a "stock" unit that consistently can be induced to give a bunch of flickering lines, PM JameZ  to have it sent in to engineering so they can figure out exactly what part is causing the issue for everyone involved.  As is, it might be related to the fact that all the screens we have can be sourced from three different suppliers, and some tolerance is just that little bit out-of-spec to cause the flickering lines.  Of course, there's to way to tell until someone can actually send a unit in for this reason, so anything we do at this point might just be a placebo.