Baby bit

[jmtorres]

(fucking a'.)

Baby Bit [my netbook, whose proper name is Free Bit from Lady Gaga's self-censored "I'm a free bit**, baby" lyric, but goes by Baby Bit much of the time because tiiiiny] seems... less inclined to randomly fade to white, or whatever the fuck she's doing [the exciting screen malfunction that made her unusable three weeks after purchase]. echan declared it was a Windows problem not a hardware problem. No idea. Anyway, since she seemed like she was inclined to behave, I started loading shit back on.

Added:
-AVG
-Firefox
--adblockplus
--add to search bar
--delicious bookmarks
--epubreader
--fireftp
--ljlogin
--noscript
--resurrect pages
--screengrab
-OpenOffice
-VLC

Got me a pretty wallpaper and forced Bit to recognize the existence of my desktop computer and steal episodes from it. One by one I will drag Numb3rs over here for my traveling entertainment.

Fade to white has occurred three times while I've been doing all that. First time was when I first abandoned her to download shit off the desktop computer over the wireless, because that looked like it was going to take forever. Baby Bit went to standby, screen dark, and when I jogged her back on, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite. I glared some and fiddled with the power save settings to take stand-by out of the equation. I was hopeful for about five minutes. Then I got me some more fade to white, twice, roughly half a minute each time, in the half an hour I've been playing around since.

I'm having to add everything back on because product support's big helpful suggestion to solve the problem was wipe everything, return to factory defaults. While I could pursue further support under warranty I am... kind of not impressed so far. Especially since they did not suggest I back anything up before taking that step. (I didn't lose anything irretrievable, but that is bad support.) If it is not a hardware problem, as echan claims, then I feel like either I or one of the more technically proficient people I know should be able to solve it with poking, and leave support out of the equation.

The fade to white phenomenon--as best I can describe it, the screen holds images longer than it should, so everything seems brighter as static images are reinforced; the mouse leaves trails and is easiest to follow if you move it very sloooowly; paging down when reading something results in a fade to the next page of text; and when typing in a text box like oh say the post entry page, the letters will come up as fast as you type them but will have a vertical line between each, as the screen remembers each iteration of the cursor. Presently this phenomenon is intermittent and brief; my last go-round back in May, it got longer-lasting until it seemed permanent. jetpack_monkey suggested it was a heat-related phenomenon (boo hardware) but I do not think that can be so as it would occur when the computer had been hibernating or just plain off for hours or days.

So. Anybody got thoughts on my Free Bit, baby? What could cause my problem? What could solve it? Does it have a more recognizable name than "fade to white" that I could google?

--And as I finish up this post I'm getting a more sustained instance of the phenomenon; it's been about ten minutes now that it's stayed, and Bit's had some flashy moments where fade to white and regular view seemed to be duking it out. Flashy with a lot of horizontal lines across the screen. Fade to white seems to be winning. And oh look, finally just now I got her back. Through nothing I can tell that *I* did.

Comments

[mjules]

I have absolutely no help to offer you, as I am useless there - just chiming in to grin over the name. My netbook's name is Little Monster.

[raine]

There was a recent update for the NVDIA video drivers for my model netbook last month (I have a newish Toshiba); have you updated your drivers lately?

[jmtorres]

I have not; this thing is still basically right out of the box. It's an MSI wind netbook. Thoughts?

[raine]

1) Do you have your screensaver set to automatically come on after a relatively short period of time? If so, try setting to something like 1 hour.
2) Are you still running Linux on the machine? There are suggestions for upgrades if you google "MSI wind netbook screen flicker problem." There's also a Windows fix here: http://www.pcurtis.com/wind.htm (scroll down a bit.)
3) Are your power saving features enabled?

Hope that helps.

[echan]

The extra weird bit I noticed while fooling around with the wireless settings: When I opened a new window, it would kinda "fade in", like start out really transparent, and slowly would go from that to the white-out you're familiar with. The superweird bit was that it never looked normal, you'd think it would have a moment of normal in there somewhere, but it never did. But the mouse's black outline always looked normal, regardless of where on the screen it was.

[jmtorres]

Yup it's like everything but straight black is superhot.

[grey_bard]

Is Free Bit still under warranty?

[jmtorres]

It is, but as mentioned, their service is asshatty suck.