My nearly four year old Microsoft Surface Pro 4 recently developed a screen flicker issue. I’m sure it was some driver update that was installed, but I’m not exactly sure when. The observed activity is that a horizontal section at the bottom of the screen about the same size of the mouse cursor flickers with data that is duplicated from the top of the screen. The rest of the screen appears to be bouncing up and down by one scan line, making the text nearly unreadable.
I searched online, and found references to flicker problems with some cases being purely hardware related and requiring replacement by Microsoft. I also found references to the problem only occurring after the screen data had not changed for a few seconds. This static screen problem matched my problem exactly.
I found a workaround by enabling the seconds display in the clock in the task bar. This is done by creating a registry entry. If the following is in a “.reg” file it will set the value to show the seconds on the clock.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "ShowSecondsInSystemClock"=dword:00000001
I read that the seconds are not enabled by default because it saves a bit of processing power, which can be important on battery powered devices. For me the difference is minimal and worth not spending more time researching a probable driver issue that may be taken care of automatically in some future windows update.
I hope that this helps someone else. The screen flicker/jitter was annoying and I wasn’t able to find the root cause.
WimsWorld 