SOLVED: Flickering, Overly Bright or Swirling Colors on Monitor of All-In-One Dell Inspiron 5477 or Optiplex 7460

If you have a Dell Optiplex 7460 or its retail brother, the Dell Inspiron 5477 and the screen:

• flickers
• is far too bright
• is blurry
• has a dark edge around the outside edge
• swirling colors
• unable to wake the system up from display off mode using touch

there is a fix for this known problem(s).

Before you run through this process, however, you should power down the unit and unplug it for one minute to see if simply draining everything resolves the problem.

These Dell all in one systems use an 24″ LG panel that periodically has the flickering, too bright… problems.  The fix is to run two firmware patches (that do not appear on the Dell drivers page) and then a conditioning cycle:

1. Download the files from us HERE and unzip them OR pull them down directly from Dell HERE, HERE and HERE
2. Run the FFU_FW_Fix_ZPE first, then the ScalarFwUpd_v1.0.0.6_FWv15_ZPE (this will take about 8 minutes)
3. Reboot
4. Run the Rolling_ZPE for 2 hours

The Rolling_ZPE is a LCD conditioner that simply rotes the screen through a number of pure colors.  In my case I could see a substantial improvement in the screen within 2 minutes.

You will NOT damage your screen if you stop the Rolling_ZPE early.  If you have to cut it short, you can simply press the ESC key, but be sure to start it up again when you are done and make sure the screen gets 2 hours of cycling.

You will NOT damage your screen if you run the Rolling_ZPE for more than 2 hours.