Why does my Thinkpad X220 screen get garbled after a while?

Question

I am running 11.04 Desktop 64bit on my Thinkpad X220 which is brand new. I ran Windows on it for a few days and that seemed to run fine. It's still on there on a separate partition.

Ubuntu installed OK, with no major issues except that my screen gets garbled at irregular intervals. The way in which it gets garbled is not consistent -- see example screens below -- and I have found no way to reproduce it.

It never happens straight after bootup, it seems to mostly occur after a day of work. I can keep working, everything responds like there is nothing wrong, except I can't see what I'm doing anymore. Needless to say this is hyper annoying. Before I send the laptop back to get it repaired or replaced, I would like to try and find out if this even a hardware problem or if it's traceable to Ubuntu. It does not seem to happen under Windows but then I rarely boot into Windows.

Answer 1

Long time ago I had very similar problems with some videocards - both times it turned out to be a symptom of the videocard dying. It was Windows 98 and then XP, but the picture was very similar.

As I remember, a temporary fix for this was to switch display to text mode and back. In Ubuntu you can do this by pressing Alt-Ctrl-F1 and then Alt-Ctrl-F7

Answer 2

I have a similar problem with 11.04 on my X120e. It gets fixed by entering screen-off mode and then coming back to normal. That is, I run xset dpms 3 4 5 wait 6 seconds until the screen is thoroughly off, then move the mouse to bring the screen back and run xset dpms 300 301 302 to return to a normal 5-minute screen-off time. I have no idea why it works, but maybe it would work for you too.

Answer 3

I had filed a bug -

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/820918

but this is not resolved. None of the suggestions above work for me.

More recently, I see that after hibernate on my laptop has this garbling. It wasn't there earlier.