Classic Shell: Forum

Hello,

It's a bit dated but I'm adding to the concern of screen flickering posted HERE which went no where.

Classic Shell v3.6.8

OS: Win7 x64
Graphics Cards (switchable):
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 (primary)
AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 (secondary/battery)

History:

I thought drivers and/or hardware failure and had the 2 laptops (model HP-dv7-4177nr) checked by HP. Perfect bill of health returned HW wise.

Next step was to rule out drivers since Google returned tons of issues with similar symptoms. AMD/ATI have a know bug that cause screen flickering, black outs, and too dim to see moments.

We did a low level format of both laptops followed by a clean install of Win7 x64. Installed the drivers provided by HP (sp49517.exe).

Success!! No symptoms when using either GPU.

Then came the install of Classic Shell v3.6.8. It finished without fail.

Post install...
No symptoms on the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 (primary) GPU. Switched to the AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 (secondary/battery) GPU and we started getting symptoms again.

The format, clean install process was repeated with multiple versions of drivers/catalyst (up to the latest version that supports the two GPUs. They all produce the same results.

I know there are tons of issues with AMD flickering bugs and Catalyst. This isn't one of them. This was verified by a low level format and new install of Win7. Hardware failure has also been ruled out by us and the manufacture's tech team.

It's a blow but I'm having to pull CS from use until we can get this resolved.

I still think CS is a great product. So far there have been no other reports of this on machines that do not have the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 active.

We went from using ClassicShell v3.6.2/3 to 3.6.8... seems something was lost or added along the way that creates this issue.

There is no system or app crash. Any feedback on more troubleshooting I can provide to resolve this in a future release?

I have 6 more of the same model laptops in house for troubleshooting and testing. Goes without saying that all 8 were used when troubleshooting possible driver issues. They all produce the same results as the 2 sent to HP for service.

Have you tried the latest beta 3.9.0 linked from the homepage to see if it fixes the flickering?

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I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

How do you know it is not a driver issue? It may be a bug that only shows with Classic Shell. It is possible some rare condition that Classic Shell is causing is not handled well by the driver. To the best of my knowledge I am doing things correctly. I am using a pretty high-level API, and it is pretty hard to misuse it.
You can try different skins. In particular try one with no transparency, like Classic.