X60 - Screen flickers and screen shutoff - problem with power management or hardware failure?

Question

Hello everyone,
this is one of the longest unsolved threads in Lenovo Forum. To keep a summary of the posts for new victims (as suggested by PDG in page 23, edited by me):
Bottom line:  
This is a video driver problem
If you have XP and can, roll back to 4450 (I currently run with 4860 in XP without problems)
If you have Vista you are basically screwed.  No one has posted any link to a functioning V32 driver.
You can find a link to a backlevel XP driver on p.21 or thereabouts.
{Windows 7, Linux} may or may not help. (no problems for me with Ubuntu 8,9 currently)
LENOVO WILL NOT HELP.  Don't waste your time.  Lenovo will say its a hardware problem because that's all they know and charge you big bux to do basically nothing when you ship them your PC.
This is the original entry:
Hi,
I always stay at the current level of available drivers with System Update.
In the last days the screen starts to flicker / jiggle once in several minutes until suddenly the whole screen turns black and can't be reactivated. I then put the X60 into standby and it wake up right after. The screen is then turned on again...
Its a 1706-AA7...
I rolled back the graphics driver to an earlier version, didn't help. Does it look like some faulty power management? Or a potential HW issue?
dsp
UPDATE: this time the screen was totally light blue... same workaround: standby -> wakeup
UPDATE2: I removed the driver completely and installed it manually from the driver matrix page. It took a couple of reboots. In between resolution was down to 640x480 with 4 bit. Not its working again without flickering...
Was this a wrong driver pushed via System Update?
Message Edited by dsp on 04-07-2008 07:01 AM
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

Hi,
no - 2 video adapters are correct! You should not remove them. Read the Intel FAQ here.
Strange - could it be that it also updated your video driver the same time? When I rolled back the video driver to a very old version, I never experienced the flicker again. No colorful blanks anymore.
The Intel downloadpage offers a backlevel driver for the chipset;
* Microsoft Windows* XP
* Driver Revision: Production Version 14.32.3
* Package: 43262
* Graphics: 6.14.10.4906
* HDMI Audio: 5.10.0.1030 But I don't know whether I should try. This release doesn't appear in the Thinkpad video driver history. Hopefully the bug will be acknowledged and they work for a fix. Where should bugs be reported, when they are not taken serious by the first level support?
dsp
Message Edited by dsp on 05-06-2008 01:19 PM