TravelMate 8215 periodic slow response and line flitting on display

I recently bought an Acer TravelMate 8215WLMi.

Occasionally the response slows down markedly (the mouse pointer moves slowly and jerkedly across the screen when I drag it, and response to key presses is very slow) and a horizontal line of interference flits arounds the screen randomly. At first I thought it was caused by interference from the mains supply but it still occurs if the 8215 is running off the battery. Anyway, my tower PC and other notebook PC do not have the same problem plugged into the same house mains ring.

After a while the flitting line and slow performance cease and the 8215 performance returns to normal.

Does anyone have the same problem? Any ideas? Is this likely to be a fault with my machine or could it be due to some of the built-in Acer "Empowering Technology" software going through a periodic routine of some kind?

 

my 8215 has no such problem. sudden slow response is often a sign of some software issue e.g. spyware, virus, or a corrupt program, but i think the interference is something very disturbing. Seems like some hardware malfunction. If I were you I would definitely return it for an exchange or have it repaired. Hope it's on warranty..

 

A year later I finally found the cause of this fault! It's due to the ATI GPU software: for reasons I don't know, occasionally there are two instances of Ati2evxx.exe running simultaneously at boot-up. When the flitting horizontal black line appears and the laptop performance is like treacle, I press CTRL-ALT-DEL to get the Windows Task Manager to pop-up, click on the Processes tab and then find the instance of Ati2evxx.exe which has a high value in the CPU column, select it and click on End Process. The laptop immediately returns to normal. I have no idea why the ATI software runs twice occasionally, but it's clearly an ATI problem and this fixes it.

 

I think its because of a "feature" in the ATI software, if the unit is under heavy load some applications appear to be not responding as windows sees it. If the ATI application gets into this state it will launch its GPU recover which will launch another instance of the process you mention.
Maybe you should try disabling the GPU recovery option in the graphics control panel and see if this prevents the issue you see.

Nice machine by the way