Some laptops, like Chromebook, and even far more expensive transformers Lenovo Yoga and Microsoft Surface suffer from a common problem – screen flashing.
That’s not light-adjustment flickering, that is the picture disappearing with the screen backlight still on. This doesn’t happen under load, in fact, quite the contrary – you get it when the screen doesn’t change much, i.e. reading or waiting for the progress bar to finish copying. When the flashing occurs, you only need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and it immediately stops. The problem is with one of the Intel HD video driver power saving features, which is called Panel self-refresh. Probably, it goes out of sync with screen refresh, causing the image to disappear and reappear on the display. Panel self-refresh saves around 1 watt, so obviously it only makes sense to use it when the laptop is on battery power Funny enough, Lenovo branded Intel drivers doesn’t have the option, but Lenovo also ships Energy Management software, which causes the same issue. So uninstall and never use any of the Lenovo bloatware, uninstall Lenovo video driver which is probably outdated anyway, install the latest video driver from Intel website and disable the Panel Self refresh in “On battery” settings in Graphics Properties. Microsoft Surface users should also change power plan from “daily” to “stable”. There also been reports that Microsoft Hyper-V causes the issue and you have to disable it, however, Hyper-V exists only in pro editions of Windows, while screen flashing occurs in home editions as well. So disabling Hyper-V is probably a waste of time. As for Chrome book, it took the developers half a year to locate and patch the issue, which is also related to panel self refresh settings. Which makes MacBook users laugh.