Screen flickering and ghosting

fsfred · November 22, 2016

Hi all!

So, a friend of mine bought a Lenovo IdeaPad Y700-15ISK(*) two weeks ago and has been experiencing some strange screen problems since he bought it. So first things first, he bought it NEW from a trusted store (I myself bought a lot of stuff from there and never had an issue) so I don't think they'd even try and sell a refurbished unit as new. These issues started right in the first days where he started experiencing screen blinks as well as sometimes complete screen shutdown despite the computer remaining on, leading to the only option of it powering back on getting it into sleep mode and wake him up afterwards (this turns on the screen again). Note that this also happens in the middle of work, its completely unjustified for it possibly entering sleep mode (which it doesn't, everything continues working and powered but not the screen). Flickering happened once before but now its continuous and much faster (perhaps a bit like if the refresh rate was very low or something..? I don't know), even after restarting the machine.

The ghosting seems to happen when browsing, for example if he's browsing on a tab and changes to the next tab the part of the screen 'freezes' and the image of what was previously there stays there (if the mouse was there, the image of it stays there aswell). Also happens when closing Edge or opening any other program window on top of it. He usually solves this by putting the pc into sleep mode and wait a good minute or so and wake him up again (if he does it fast it does not solve the problem, only thing it does is turning the edges of the screen darker). This happens only in the edges of the screen, and strangely enough is not linear as well (see pics below).

This issues have been going on for a few days happening every once in a while but it now seems to be non-stop flickering even after restarting it (for the last few hours). He already took the machine to the store he bought it from and it stayed there for diagnosis for a full 3 days, they claimed they did all their usual tests as well as all tests Lenovo tells them to do and found nothing, also said they found no problems while using it. So, any of you experienced this and found a solution? Any ideas of what it might be?

(*)