Hi,

I have a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop which has some flavour of Geforce2 Go graphics adaptor.
When I enable Cleartype in the OS (XP Pro SP1) mIRC 6.15's scrolling becomes extremely slow and flickery.
This does not occur with regular font smoothing, nor on Windows 2000.
I'm using the font Courier New at size 10.
I'm using the most recent WHQL'd graphics drivers that I can find.

Can anyone suggest a workaround? The scrolling is painfully slow but I find ClearType very useful

Thanks,

James

That has happened to me on another machine that I used about a year ago though it doesn't happen on my laptop. I also noticed that it was worse on some fonts than others. I did notice that Microsoft Sans Serif was almost immune while the similar font MS Sans Serif suffered badly. I don't know what one can do besides a better video card. I found that changing monitors/monitor types didn't help much.

My advice is to contact Dell. They should know the answer or be able to offer you a work-around.

more memory maybe

I can report a *tiny* amount (negligable) of scroll slow down if I enable cleartype on my desktop PC and switch to courier font. However, I have not tested this with a huge amount of text in my scroll-back buffer.

I would expect this to happen, though, as the computer has to anti-alias the text on-the-fly at a very quick rate as you scroll up or down. This is, I imagine, quite a CPU intensive task to perform.

My system stats for your comparison:

XP Pro SP1a
Athlon XP 2400+ 2 GHz processor
512 MB DDR ram
Radeon 9200 SE gfx card

My specs are:

P4-mobile 1.7
384MB DDR
16MB Geforce2 Go graphics

not BAD by any means. I've emailed Dell anyhow, waiting to see what they say.

A 16MB video card isn't exactly a gutsy card, by rights in this day and age you should have been given at least a 32 or possibly a 64.

Well, true. This laptop is about 18 months old however! I only noticed this issue when I upgraded to XP and could use Cleartype. Still, you'd think that 16MB of video memory would be adequate for 1024x768 at true colour =/

Also - Dell support are crap.

Any news on cleartype?
I've enabled it, and tuned it using MS's tuner, and now my mirc windows (all of them) flicker when changing from one window to another. Disable "cleartype" and problem goes away. This flickering only occurs in mirc. Version 6.16

I think I have enough ram and decent enough graphics card to rule out problems there.

1gig pc4400 corsair xms
ati radeon 9800XT (with most current drivers)
Pentium 3.2c
BenQ FP937s @ 1280x1024 on DVI