X60s battery / screen problem

I just acquired an X60s and did a fresh factory image on it then installed all updates.

I have a strange problem. When I unplug the power cord the screen rapidly flashes on and off.

Any ideas what the problem may be? Has anyone else had this problem? I did not discover the problem until I had installed all my applications and personal files so I'm trying to avoid doing another factory image restore to see if that will solve the problem!

 

does it do it continuously or does it do it just once and then remain normal? I believe mine just changes the brightness when I switch between battery and the plug power

 

Depending on how your graphics card power saving options are set, it might be switching the GPU to powersave mode.

As long as it doesn't lock up and everything looks normal, that should be normal as most default power profiles in XP/Vista will change screen brightness for you when switching power states. If you're on Vista and using the "Power Saver" profile, it will also flicker a bit because it turns the window transparency feature of Aero off to save power.

Out of curiousity, what graphics card are you running?

 

To clarify:

the screen flashes rapidly and constantly on/off so that I cannot see anything on the screen. Like a strobe light! The only way to stop it is to plug it back in.

The video card is the onboard GMA 950.

 

Ah, are you running Vista or XP?

Sounds like a driver issue to me. I would check Windows Update for a newer GMA950 driver first, and then depending on what version of Windows you're running, Intel may have something newer you could try.

 

I've just checked my x60s does not do that with battery. But when it boots up, the screen does flash off and on once - i.e. the wallpaper comes on, icons etc and then suddenly everything goes black for a half a second or so and back to colours. Is that normal?

 

Yep, sounds normal. You can get the same behavior on other laptops with different graphics cards as well. It's usually just the GPU adjusting power saving modes.

 

Just in case anyone else runs into the same problem, apparently my "strobe light" screen behaviour was due to a video driver issue.

If I installed the windows update suggested video driver, I got the strobe light screen thing.

I uninstalled the video driver that windows update put on and instead installed the thinkvantage "update my system" video driver. No problems anymore