Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

[natman2007]

Hi I have 904 installed on my toshiba laptop with a Mobile Intel® GMA 4500MHD graphics ( all shared memory ). I have effects enabled and they all work but there is some weird stuff when i min and max windows, or flickering when im dragging a window around, other times a portion of the window will just not display ( goes black ) but mouse over it and its back. other times it just seems slow.
My laptop has 3gb mem, 2ghx dual core it seems kind strange i am having these sort of problems with an open source friendly graphics like intel? Any advice to get a smoother desktop experience?

Thanks:
Patrick

[The Liquidator]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

If you turn off desktop effects does the problem go away?

[natman2007]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

That was the first thin i tried, its caused little to no difference ( personally i think it actually got a tiny bit worse ) but basically effects on/off makes no difference. I have played around with Open gl/xrender and the texture from pixmap settings none seem to get rid of the problem.
I have seen some talk that the intel drivers are a bit messed up - that true?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

Yes, that is true I am afraid.

I have dell 630m with the now infamous intel 915 graphics card. I get a flicker when kde4 is starting up, and when I launch wine applications (odd that one). Desktop effects can be enabled but won't run (I believe as kwineffects perceives the card to be too slow).

You may be aware of a new repository with updated drivers including an intel one. It didn't help me much but your card is different so your mileage might be also.

http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/...epository.html

Worth a shot!

[natman2007]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

Okay i might give that a try, my only worry is i end up getting an upadated driver that is worse and i cant go back to the old. How do i save the old and experiment with the new?
New user profile ?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

Actually that one is easy - you just remove the new driver and then deactivate the new repository. Then update the package list and the intel driver that is available will be the old one again. Obviously you need to install it before you shut down the machine!

Whilst you are at it you might think about a clean up job in that in the default installation you will have installed all sorts of graphics drivers (ati, nvidia, S3 etc etc) and it won't do any harm to remove the ones you don't want

[natman2007]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

Okay I just did that, and it seems ( fingers crossed ) to have a made the difference. For a test i put up 6 virtual desktops and enabled a lot of effects and when for a play, apart from a small slowness ( way better than before ) it was perfect. Seems to be better now. If there is any more glitches ill post again. Thanks for the help.
Patrick

[The Liquidator]

Re: Graphics ( intel ) on my laptop

Glad you seem to have got somewhere with it

Ian