HP 8460P Elitebook Screen flickers and Scrambles Randomly

amodoko

Member
Okay, just acquired this laptop. It came with Windows 7 Pro, but I immediately upgraded it to Windows 10 Pro. Then I realized the screen would flicker or scramble for a few seconds and then will fix itself after a few seconds (about once every 30 minutes only). I've included a picture of the scrambled screen to show you what I mean. It is not a major issue to me personally since the the screen works 99% of the time. I thought maybe it was a conflict with my upgrade to Windows 10 Pro so I reformatted the laptop and reinstalled Windows 7 Pro. I thought it was fixed, but then after a while it started to do it again. I also must mention, at some point my ac adapter stopped working so most of my use on my laptop has been using the remaining charge on the battery. I am waiting for a new ac adapter to come in the mail in a few days. So can anyone give me an idea of what the problem may be? Is it something to do with being used on battery power vs being plugged in (can't test this yet since I don't have a working ac adapter at the moment)? Or is it something to do with a loose ribbon cable? Or could it be a video driver issue? Is my screen going bad? Not really sure. I tried to google this a bit, and it seems like some people have fixed similar problems like this on other computers with reformats, but that didn't work for me.
 

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Check that the video driver is up to date

Does it do it to only this laptop or the other one too? If it's just this one and the video driver doesn't fix it, it could be a bad GPU or bad RAM.
 
Okay, I just looked into it a bit more and tried searching online and found a potential solution. To answer your questions though, I re-downloaded the driver that was available on HP's website. However, that did not appear to fix the problem. Also, I only own one 8460p and this is the only laptop that I own that has the issue. But after doing a bit more searching online, I may have found the solution as the problem seems to be gone at the moment after doing a fix. According to some people online, the Intel HD Graphics 3000's driver is the culprit. You can resolve the issue by either rolling back the driver to a specific one that is stable, or you can go into a setting in your graphics properties and disable 'Display Refresh Rate Switching' and 'Display Power Saving Technology' when it is on battery. After I disabled those two things, the screen no longer temporarily scrambles when I boot up the laptop. It appeared to do it most when I was booting the laptop up on battery power and now it doesn't do it at all. So hopefully that solved it and maybe this will help someone else. I will have to test it out more over the next week or so both with battery power and plugged in to see if it does it again. Thanks for your quick response, much appreciated!
 
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