Code Away

A while ago I was at a colleague’s desk, coaxing him to read my last post (yes, that’s what this blog has come to) when I saw his screen go through a long session of repaint every time he attempted scrolling the browser window.

Most users don’t recognize this (they generally term it as My Computer is Too Slow), some can’t identify the reason. The basic and extremely easy solution to turn off that irritating screen repaint is to update your graphics drivers.

I wondered why, my colleague, knowing this solution, was too pooped to update his graphics drivers. The answer lay in an obscure (and much confusing) horror story about his driver installations in his Compaq notebook. Make sure you take a complete Windows Driver CD from your vendor, I always say

Anyhoo, that’s neither here nor there. Where was I… yeah, driver installation. So if you don’t install your graphics card’s driver, Windows hops on to use a generic pure-software graphic rendering (which works with all cards). So, while your graphics card gulps electricity (even the onboard cards do. They all live. They all have a heart), the Windows machine refuses to use any of its capabilities, instead slowing down your work and providing additional stress to your eyes with the frequent screen repaints.

So just update those drivers for a trouble-free life. Reduce screen repaints. Utilize your card. Rest your eyes. As a bonus, the StandBy option will be available once vga drivers are installed, so you can save precious minutes of battery life on your notebooks. Since the Hibernate option is an (extremely useful) extension of StandBy, there you go, you can Hibernate the machine without any problems (as long as you have a few hundred MBs of free disk space).