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Recently I'm facing this annoying issue of screen blinking on my laptop. I have a dual boot laptop mostly booting into Ubuntu.

Now, when I try to boot windows 10, screen goes blank completely, but when I boot into Ubuntu the screen blink happens regularly.

Laptop: Sony vaio
Processor: Intel core i3 
Graphics: Intel ironlake mobile
Ubuntu version: 18.04.4 64bit
K7AAY
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Krishna Kireeti Mamidi
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    If your windows could not boot with that, then most likely your graphics adapter is dying... Try to boot using different liveCDs for linux and windows to check what will happen. – Gryu Apr 22 '20 at 14:19
  • Hey @Gryu , as you suggested I tried to boot ubuntu 16.04 this time with live usb and from the last 60 minutes I haven't seen any blinking. How can I make this fix permanent? – – Krishna Kireeti Mamidi Apr 23 '20 at 09:02
  • To make it permanent it is not bad to find out what caused this behavior. Possible solutions from easiest to hardest are: 1) change display manager: sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3. You could also try kdm, lxdm and so on; 2) Load from previously installed kernels; 3) Try to change graphics drivers (but I don't know how it could be done in your case. You need to find out how to do it for your graphics. And if you've failed, then describe here what you tried and what you've get: errors, black screen, graphical issues and so on. – Gryu Apr 23 '20 at 09:30
  • As you suggested, after updating the graphics driver the issue stopped for a while but continued after sometime. Changing display manager didn't do anything and I don't know how to rollback to previous kernel version and couldn't find a proper tutorial too. While booting windows the screen still goes blank. Now, I'm sure that this is a software related issues not hardware. – Krishna Kireeti Mamidi Apr 23 '20 at 16:52
  • To change back to lightdm, just do sudo kpkg-reconfigure lightdm. To boot from earlier it is good to know what you have in your /boot: ls /boot/ | grep vmlinuz. Then try the next thread: https://askubuntu.com/questions/82140/how-can-i-boot-with-an-older-kernel-version – Gryu Apr 23 '20 at 16:57
  • I've done this part and I'm still having the problem. Will downgrading the ubuntu version to 16.04 helps? – Krishna Kireeti Mamidi Apr 23 '20 at 17:18
  • I don't really know. It could or couldn't help. You could downgrade to 16.04 or upgrade to 20.04. I would recommend upgrading first. But first try to boot or install and then boot into older kernels. – Gryu Apr 23 '20 at 17:25
  • I think I messed up, I installed older kernel and now when ubuntu loads the screen freezes (mouse, keyboard are not working). Even usb stick is not loading ubuntu. How can I remove ubuntu completely without any data loss? – Krishna Kireeti Mamidi Apr 25 '20 at 04:24
  • If you installed older kernel it does not mean you could not boot into newer kernel and remove that older. I've gave you link on how to boot into different kernel. And yes, you coul remove ubuntu without any data loss. Just boot into livecd, backup data and then remove. – Gryu Apr 25 '20 at 04:41
  • You could check your livecd's kernel version and install it: uname -a on your installed system. And also, you did not show info I've asked you in previous comments. – Gryu Apr 25 '20 at 05:48

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@Gyru, thanks for your suggestions man, because of you I was able to explore more to find a solution.

Although the suggestions given to me didn't completely eliminate my issue. I tried the following to get rid of screen blinking.

  1. I tried to downgrade the ubuntu kernel and changed device graphics drivers but none of the worked fine. (Worked for a while but returned after sometime).

  2. I tried uninstalling ubuntu from dual boot, but the problem was still there even after removing ubuntu.

  3. Took backup of my necessary files in windows and installed Ubuntu 20.04 from bootable usb and removed windows 10 completely. (I used android mobile to create bootable ubuntu usb).

Now, I'm happily using ubuntu 20.04 (with no data loss) and I must admit it feels pretty good to use 20.04 compared to 18.04.

Krishna Kireeti Mamidi
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