4 ms·
Author here. My intuition says that's probably a faulty backlight panel. Not sure if you know that, but the liquid crystal that creates the image and colors is
by alin23 4y ago
Author here. My intuition says that's probably a faulty backlight panel.
Not sure if you know that, but the liquid crystal that creates the image and colors is very dark by itself, so behind the crystal panel there's another panel filled with bright white LEDs to project the image into your eyes.
Those LEDs can draw a lot of power and get hot, so they need proper passive cooling. In laptops that's usually achieved by gluing the LEDs to the lid and making the whole lid a massive heatsink (if it's a metal lid).
It's possible that your backlight panel was overheating for some reason, or maybe it was just drawing more power than the source (old battery?) could provide. That would explain the continous blinking/ringing until the power/temperature stabilized, but it's really just a guess.
It doesn't really sound like a software error anyway.
- staindk 4y agoI hoped to see a more solid answer because I caused a (I think) similar thing to happen on a friend's MacBook a couple years ago. I think I was using some utility to force the resolution down from retina levels for some emulated game we wanted to play. Something went wrong and the top ~1/5 of the screen started flickering insanely quickly. We restarted the laptop and the flickering continued. Then I think we turned it off, left it off for a while, then turned it back on. Still flickering. In the end we left the laptop on for a couple hours and it slowly became less flickery until it was eventually entirely back to normal. Super weird. I was so confused and my friend was so nice about it all that I didn't even think to take a video or document any exact stuff we tried aha.