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How to prevent screen flickering when scrolling chrome? (nvidia issue)

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app103:
So, you have set this laptop up and optimized it to be the perfect environment for making music. Has the thought occurred to you that this machine should be dedicated to making music, and nothing more? This may be one of those situations where that would make the most sense, since any updating would interfere with making music, and not updating would interfere with doing anything else.

urlwolf:
Thanks all for your input.
The machine is a pristine win7 install. It doesn't even have wireless drivers installed. All my dev work happens in a vmware virtual box. So it is music sanctuary.

@carol, the MS drivers are the same old ones I'm using.

@tinman, I'm pretty sure interactions are nasty, so I have reduced the active drivers to a mininum. But if nvidia/hp didn't test this, there's little else we can do.

I've raised a ticket with HP. The machine is under warranty. Took 3-4 calls to get the right dept. They redirected me to the german branch, which is unfortunate, as in Germany customer service is not a strong point. They asked me to write a detailed case, which I did, and I'm waiting to hear back from them.

Replacing the card or the machine  (to something that is proven against dpc latency) sounds like the only reasonable option, and is what the UK service offered (5 business days). Let's see what HP Germany does, I suspect something borderline insulting to anyone who has experienced decent customer service living abroad.

Tinman57:
@tinman, I'm pretty sure interactions are nasty, so I have reduced the active drivers to a mininum. But if nvidia/hp didn't test this, there's little else we can do.  -urlwolf (May 19, 2013, 02:42 PM)
--- End quote ---

  It's impossible to test every driver combination for everything on the market, especially since people install their own drivers for added software/hardware and drivers are always being updated.  They test their computers for the original configuration it has when it's sold, then MS updates drivers about once a month (along with user installed drivers) and totally invalidates the verified test.

Carol Haynes:
If you are using VMware on there it has a lot of services running all the time that won't give you a clean audio environment!

IainB:
@urlwolf: Thanks for this interesting discussion.
..I now belive HP is the most incompetent company I know...
-urlwolf (May 15, 2013, 09:41 AM)
--- End quote ---
In defence of HP, I would suggest that it probably only looks that way to you because of your (this) bad experience.
I had the same sort of experience with DELL support when trying to renew a maintenance contract for a laptop bought in one country (UK) but being used in another country (NZ) - the latter being where I needed the support. I eventually got there, but I shudder when thinking about it, even now, and "incompetent" was one of the most polite of the epithets/expletives I used.

In reality, both HP and DELL have amazingly good pools of highly-skilled and competent technicians, but they are isolated/insulated from the formalised support business process. They had to be isolated because they are relatively few in number, and are only assigned to work on 2nd level support issues. The 1st level support is done (or attempted) by the people you get into contact with via their Support centre (the customer-facing part) - and the first contact you make there is likely to be more of an administrator or problem-router than a pukka support technician wiz.

For what it is worth, and simply in the hope that it might be of use/help, here are some of my experiences when trying to sort out some annoying DPC latency issues on my HP ENVY 14 laptop (ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650 1GB Dedicated Graphics) - operating system is Win7-64 Home Premium.
The latency seemed to be adversely affecting the quality of the graphics display (I have mostly fixed that) and the sound output (still fixing that):

* 1. I reckoned that there would be a techo wiz somewhere in HP who would know exactly what my laptop problem was caused by and whether it could be fixed, and if so what the appropriate/necessary fix or workaround was. I also reckoned that my chances of getting to actually talk to that person or having them focus on this problem for me were probably pretty bleak.
What I knew was that these wizzes would likely as not often be busy helping out in support forums, so I googled "DPC latency" and also googled for forums referring to HP ENVY 14, ATI/AMD Mobility Radeon HD5650, and other support forums.
Some examples (links and tools):

* What is DPC Latency?
* DPC Latency Checker tool and notes on same.
* How to Diagnose and Fix High DPC Latency Issues with WPA (Windows Vista/7/8)
* Poor Jerky Performance: Fixing Unacceptably High DPC Latency Issues
* LatencyMon - tool checks if a system running Windows is suitable for processing real-time audio and other tasks.
* Windows SysInternals Process Monitor v3.04 and notes on same.
* HP forum: DPC latency
* HP forum: 6735s Sound stutter, high DPC latency
* HP forum: Sound Stuttering and DPC Latency (Pavilion Dv7)

* 2. Getting an upgrade to the display driver was a real headache, and I posted about my solution here: Problems with AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6500M/5600/5700 Series GPU driver/software


* 3. Tweaking and experimenting all standard Windows graphics/animation features (e.g., switching them on/off and seeing what the results were).
General result: using the CPU for full graphics output (instead of the GPU) improved the quality of the display for written material.


* 4. Tweaking and experimenting with the settings for the AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6500M/5600/5700 Series GPU driver.
General result: using the GPU for full graphics output (instead of the CPU) reduced the graphics image quality but speeded up the animation (reduced latency).


* 5. There is an option in Google Chrome chrome://settings/, under Show advanced settings-->System to Use hardware acceleration when available. I expect there may be similar settings in the other browsers, but am unsure where.
So you can see that for graphics there were trade-offs there. Probably the trade-offs will take the general form of: optimising for good graphics output will result in sub-optimal audio output, and vice versa.
For audio, I am still trying to get to grips with understanding what automatic priority interrupts from what device/driver are being assigned precedence in the queue over the audio output, but the DPC Latency Checker tool seems to be proving quite useful there. The WiFi network adapter looks like it might be causing some of the problems in my case.

Example of DPC Latency Checker tool in use (the notes in the image might be useful):

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