I had a gig the other night but had to finish after an hour when the Windows Home Screen flashed so rapidly that I couldn’t not load a new set. When I got home and tried again, all was perfectly normal without even a hinge of constant flashing. I had tried several times at the gig to restart, but the same flashing kept happening. Any thoughts on why this happened and what the fix might be?
Did the audio interface disconnect? Was it red? (I guess that’s not what you’re saying, but….).
The whole Home Screen was flashing about two or three times a second and also jumping from side to side. Ive never seen this happen before. There was so much movement that I could not select a new gig file. No colours just the expected scene that would not stay still.
Did any of your other equipment show signs there might be power issues? When tearing down, did you notice anything not fully plugged in correctly?
Ouch. For the sake of clarity: What is the ‘Windows Home Screen’? Is it the basic screen of GP or do you mean the screen of GP (which is actually Windows Explorer).
Someone with more computer knowledge than me will know more, but so far sounds like a possible video card (hardware) issue.
@bigalminal This sounds like what I went through with my Lenovo P17 ThinkPad laptop. It has two display controllers, the on chip Intel controller for the laptop display and a GTX controller for an external monitor. When I was just using the laptop’s internal display, every once in a while, the display would blank off and then quickly on again. It was random and didn’t happen often. When I added an external monitor, I would often get exactly what you’re describing, very rapid screen blanking, rendering it unreadable. It took some time to locate the mouse pointer to select the Restart function. Sometimes, I even had to power cycle the laptop by long-pressing on the Power button.
What I finally figured out was to leave the external display’s power off until Windows had fully booted to the login screen (I wait for the USB-connected indicator on my RME Fireface to light up), then I power up my LG monitor. I now have zero flickering problems.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with your problem, but I was able to find other references online of Lenovo owners having similar problems. As is typical with such things, none of the suggested “fixes” (like reinstalling the video adapter driver) had any impact. I just kept trying things until I figured out a process that worked.
2 Likes
Because I was on the street, I was using my power block which had several hours of juice left. While I didn’t check it, I’m pretty sure that being isolated from the national grid would not have caused this problem.
Thats what I’m expecting as well. What I have not mentioned is that I carried out a complete rebuild about a month ago, and the flickering thingy occurred only after this new build was complete.
I’ve have just thought of the following - I have another posting elsewhere on this forum about rackspaces upon loading jumping to the top left hand corner of the screen and reducing to 1/4 the size whilst doing so. After a few seconds, they fill the screen as normal when the rackspace has fully loaded. I’m wondering if the two issues are connected. I think I’ll try a graphics driver re-install just in case it does actually fix the issue.
I went into Device manager and tried to disable the graphics driver but got all sorts of warnings. What is the best way of doing it?
Normally in Windows if you disable the graphics driver from, say, Intel or Nvidia, Windows is smart enough to use a generic graphics driver with the bare minimum, so you shouldn’t end up with a system without any interface.
So, this problem only occurred when you were using the power block? Maybe use that power block at home and see if you have the same issue? (Maybe there is an issue with the power block?)
Good thought. I’ll try that.
I tried the power block for a couple of hours but had no problem.
I’m wondering though what effect that the slowness of the Task Manager to remove GP instances from memory when changing gig files has to do with the issue (I have posted about this.) I keep the Task Manager window open, and at times I see three instances of GP sitting in there for quite a few seconds before they vanish one by one. Is there any way that GP can remove these instances more quickly, like instantly?
It’s not necessarily GP itself. The plugins need to free the memory they’re using. If the memory is allocated in (very) small chunks, it’s also going to be freed in (very) small chunks. That might take quite some time.
Are you terminating the GP instance in the Task Manager?
For me, it does not instantaneously release the ram, but usually maybe takes 5-10 seconds.
**
jeffn1**Regular
bigalminalAre you terminating the GP instance in the Task Manager?
Yes I am. But it’s an extra step that I sometimes forget to do. After an editing session all morning, there could be two or three instances of GP residing in the TM. Why are the old ones still there after I have loaded a new gig file? Could a script be created and inserted into the Global RS that sends a message to the TM to activate the unloading of old gig files as an extra step? Although I guess that’s might be happening anyway. Cheers and thanks for all the responses.