Recently we started to notice a screen ghosting issue on a Windows 7 Pro 64-bit PC. The PC has been in use for some time but the issue had started to worsen. The "ghosting" issue as referred to here relates to an artifact of the prior screen or window remaining visible for some period of time after a screen has been moved or closed. It might also be described as a "lag" or as a screen display/refresh issue.
Since a Google Chrome browser with the latest updates was normally always loaded and active running in the background on this PC, we didn't have a reason to suspect the browser as the cause, but when closing the browser, we noticed that the screen ghosting problem stopped. It also stops we realized when the browser is minimized.
Investigating further, it appeared to be possibly related to a setting in Chrome relating to hardware acceleration. The specific setting is at (with the browser launched and having focus):
ALT-F (hold down ALT then press F and release - or in the upper right hand corner of the browser window, click on the round button with three dots)
Settings
Scroll down and clicked on Advanced
Scroll down to the System section
Slide the Use hardware acceleration when available option to the left to turn it off
Click on Relaunch
 |
| Default |
 |
| Hardware acceleration off |
At first it seemed like this resolved the issue on this particular desktop PC.
But no. We noticed that the "ghosting" still occurred when the browser window was in the background of another application's window. Minimize the Chrome browser window behind, and the behavior disappears.
There have been suggestions made elsewhere about also clearing the Chrome cache, and running ipconfig /flushdns and netsh winsock reset at the command (cmd) line and re-booting. The Chrome cache is regularly cleared from this PC. Clearing the cache did not change the behavior. So we then ran the ipconfig and netsh commands (but with low expectations) and re-booted.
The problem remains and must relate to some other Chrome setting.
Knowing that the ghosting problem seems to fully disappear when Chrome is minimized helps help to manage this annoying behavior which we've been unable to duplicate using any other combination of running programs.
