The flickering at bootup is normal... I was going to suggest that maybe your anti-virus is causing this when it scans your system secretly, but you said that it's happening on a fresh install of windows 7 with only updates installed. Maybe it's a driver issue ... but at this point I'm just saying anything that comes to mind... I hope some1 can help you more...
I have two versions of windows 7 ultimate, one from the torrent and one from MSDN. I'll still try to DL the iso from other sources. what program is good for checking the MD5/SHA-1?
It's your hard drive. Well, more basically it is the lack of the Intel Storage Matrix program from intel.com that you can download. But before you do that I want you to use Everest and copy and paste the report here to see if in fact you do have intel hard drive controllers. It's definitely the controllers. It's why my Dell freezes until I install those drivers. It will freeze every 1-2 minutes for about 30 seconds until it's installed. If you do have intel HD controllers then that's your problem. But first give us an everest report Or give me your manufacturer and the model and number for the prefab computer. If it's custom built then give me that information. Motherboard model and number is all I need.
Do you have the latest BIOS for your board? Try reseating PCI devices, RAM and SATA/IDE drives? Overclocking? Just throwing somethings out there maybe something sticks
MoBO Does you mother board belong to the ASUS p5nT family? As mentioned earlier the nividia chipset drivers are pretty useless but its really the chipset itself. If it is one of those MOBO then up the voltage in bios for northbridge to 1.5 and 1.2 HT to 1.4 volts. Hope you get it sorted soon
I have just recovered my system from the same problem. I tried everything to resolve it, including standing on my head. So after re-building my system and re-installing win 7 for about the 20th time I started installing yet again this time going into system repair. using diskpart I cleaned the partition's and created partition primary ect. exited and ran format f: /fs:ntfs /b:1 command. F: being your drive letter and the /b:1 switch writes 0's to the hard drive and the 1 is number of passes. re-installed windows yet again and no more freezing...it's worked....another thing I tried since my problem was the first few sectors of my hard drive was to create a small 20gig partition and use the volume command in diskpart to select the partition then use the command attirbute volume set nodefaultdriveletter. this effectivly hides the partition then install as normal. try either of these methods. In conclusion my problem was caused by a virus/malaware which works by trashing the boot sector and first few sectors of your drive......