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Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
Ok, so I like to use a low brightness for fairly obvious reasons. In my lighting at home I'm actually able to get away with the lowest or just one or two notches up at the most. A while back I started to switch the harddrive to a 7200 RPM drive (which was surprisingly low power to the extent that I was able to run it on USB even) and I noticed the screen flickering along with the harddrive accessing which worried me since it made me think maybe it was still managing to use just a bit too much power or something and might be interfering with other circuits.
Well, I've come to notice that the screen is actually flickering even on the original stock drive. By flickering I mean basically the backlight just sort of darkens and lightens a little bit rather than holding steady. It stays mostly steady but just sort of changes for a moment, then goes back from time to time. Well, given that this is surely not an LED backlit display (they've only just more recently become cost effective enough that they might start going into things like netbooks any time soon if they haven't already) I have to assume it's still the old CCFL technology they've been using forever, and these have been known to do a lot of annoying things at low brightness settings (and, ironically, a lot of bad things at higher settings, so I guess they're never happy. I guess I'll be glad when LED backlighting has matured and what problems it has go away for good hopefully, but that does nothing for this particular system.)
So I guess I have two questions. First, should I be worried about the backlight? Second, the other harddrive caused it to flicker more, but it wasn't horrible. Is it maybe safe to switch over to it after all? It's not just at least a little bit faster (I was dissapointed with it when I tried it on a desktop system as it's worse than a true 7200 RPM drive latency-wise due to the power-saving stuff and was only saving me a little bit of energy but it surely still better than the stock low-power 5400 RPM drive, but it's still surely at least a little bit better latency-wise) and also larger which might be the more important factor of the two.
Well, I've come to notice that the screen is actually flickering even on the original stock drive. By flickering I mean basically the backlight just sort of darkens and lightens a little bit rather than holding steady. It stays mostly steady but just sort of changes for a moment, then goes back from time to time. Well, given that this is surely not an LED backlit display (they've only just more recently become cost effective enough that they might start going into things like netbooks any time soon if they haven't already) I have to assume it's still the old CCFL technology they've been using forever, and these have been known to do a lot of annoying things at low brightness settings (and, ironically, a lot of bad things at higher settings, so I guess they're never happy. I guess I'll be glad when LED backlighting has matured and what problems it has go away for good hopefully, but that does nothing for this particular system.)
So I guess I have two questions. First, should I be worried about the backlight? Second, the other harddrive caused it to flicker more, but it wasn't horrible. Is it maybe safe to switch over to it after all? It's not just at least a little bit faster (I was dissapointed with it when I tried it on a desktop system as it's worse than a true 7200 RPM drive latency-wise due to the power-saving stuff and was only saving me a little bit of energy but it surely still better than the stock low-power 5400 RPM drive, but it's still surely at least a little bit better latency-wise) and also larger which might be the more important factor of the two.