Video drivers

[auldane]

Some minor issues to report. The GMA500 driver that Win7 automatically gets from Windows Update isn't very good. Lots of laggy redraws. The one rasseren links to in the drivers/installation thread is better.

However, it also has a few issues. Sometimes, like after a UAC prompt, non-invalidated portions of the screen draw black. So, for example, the taskbar will be visible along with icons on the desktop, but empty portions of the desktop are black. Dragging an icon around "clears" the black. It also fixes itself after a short time.

Bits of the display sometimes flicker. For example, the chrome between the search bar and the stop button in IE8 flickers light gray a little, as do other areas. Only happens sometimes (not now, for example, but yesterday a lot). It is not very distracting.

My TV experiences the overdraw symptom reported elsewhere on the forum. The edges of the screen are cut off (eg can't see the back button in IE8). This is fine for my purposes though. My TV is a bit older (Hitachi Ultravision 42HDT52A) and does not seem to have any options to use native resolution, etc.

The worst happened last night. I tried to play two movie files in WMP off the internet. The first had scanline sync issues, where pixels on different lines did not line up. The second locked up the UI, and the display driver crashed, forcing a reboot. I unfortunately do not remember which file or which site, though I don't have reason to think it was malicious. I'll try a "known good" local file and post the results.

Finally, although I can use up to 1920x1080, horizontal lines flicker continuously. I suspect this is because my TV only supports 1080i. It's annoying enough that I went down to 720, which looks fine.

Its main use is as a file server though, which it is doing a great job of so far! Flash games also work well. Hopefully when Intel has a win7 driver finalized the other stuff will be fixed, but not a big deal to me anyway.

[auldane]

Well, that was easy! I tried a known good wmv file (recorded off a webcam on another computer, runs perfectly on other machines) and the same crash occurred. File loaded, first frame displayed, then the mouse pointer got laggy for several seconds, and poof the display vanished. Not a blue screen, but still have to reboot to recover.

I'll be happy to supply any further information, the file in question, etc, to anyone who wants it.

[irads]

The horizontal lines are an issue we observed with playback using GMA500 drivers at 1920x1080. Hopefully future drivers will improve this.