Random screen flicker on Dell Inspiron 9400

[Ken Pratt]

Binary package hint: compiz-core

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop with an nVidia card:

nVidia Corporation GeForce Go 7900 GS rev 161, Mem @ 0xed000000/24, 0xd0000000/28, 0xee000000/24, I/O @ 0xef00/7, BIOS @ 0xefe00000/17

The screen randomly flickers. By flicker I mean blinks as if a single black frame is painted in the stream of normal frames. This flicker occurs when I am actively interacting with the screen in some way such as scrolling a text screen or moving a window. It is not the cursor blink reassigned.

I can not reliable re-create this situation. The flicker happens about once every few minutes and seems to come in sets of two or three. Scrolling in Firefox seems to cause the flickering to occur more often.

[Vexamus (vexamus)]

I can confirm this. I have an XPS m1710 with a 7950 GTX under the hood. Ubuntu 7.10 and 100.14.19 driver(packaged in release). Firefox DOES seem to exacerbate the problem, however it does sometimes happen at the idle desktop.

[rax_m (rax-m)]

I have a Toshiba P100-429 with an nVidia Geforce 7600 Go.. and can confirm this screen flicker there too.

I have Compiz enabled. The problem seems to occur randomly as well as when opening applications that require administrator priveledges..

[David Anes (kraptor)]

Same as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-kernel-common/+bug/164589
Possible solutions there.