W510 checkered pixel patterns while running on battery [workaroun​d]

Question

Hey all, got my W510 in the mail yesterday and am quite pleased with it so far, but I have one issue that I've determined to be related to the power profiles.  When using any energy-saving power profile while running off battery power, when I have a flash website (e.g. Nvidia's homepage) open in IE or Chrome or if I move any window around the screen enough, some kind of strange pixel checkering occurs constantly when the screen has too much activity.  It's as if every other pixel gets shifted over by one making what looks like a checkerboard out of all the pixels on the screen.  I can still read the screen, but it makes my head spin.
If I choose the standard 'Max Performance' power profile, the issue doesn't manifest when running on the battery.  If I choose any of the others or create my own profile to mimic the Max Performance profile, I still get the checkers.  It still manifests if I go through and turn off all power-saving options or increase the brightness of the backlight.  If I start with the Max Performance profile and adjust it to my needs, the problem doesn't occur.  Something tells me that the performance profile has something subtly different than all the others and it's not a configurable setting.
Has anyone else experienced this problem?  Should I upgrade my Nvidia drivers from version 188.25, which came with the machine?  I've read that other people have had issues upgrading their Nvidia driver.  The way the system behaves, this seems like a power management issues more than an Nvidia driver issue.
Edit: I should also add that I don't have the issue while running on the AC adapter.  Also if I take a screenshot while the pixel shifting occurs, the screenshot is crisp and clear with no signs of the pixel problem.  This seems purely hardware/power management related.
Edit: see my later post on adjusting the power settings to work around this issue.
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Answer 1

It's reasonably likely that whatever issue you're seeing is linked to a setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel. So the best diagnostic you can do is, in high-performance mode (where the problem DOESN'T occur), write down the value of EVERY single setting that's available in that control panel.
Then, put the machine in a power mode in which the problem DOES occur. Then again go into the NVIDIA Control Panel and check every single available setting to see if anything has changed. There's a reasonable chance that you'll then find out what setting is causing the problem.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video probably ten times that. Taking a close-up shot of the screen while the problem is occuring, with either a still camera or preferably a video camera (or both), may help siginifcantly in diagnosing the problem. A simulated picture may differ in some subtle way from what's really happening, and those subtleties may be important. For instance, does the effect only break up vertical lines, and not horizontal lines? And does it only happen to content that is moving on the screen? And you're running your display at its native resolution, and not some larger or smaller resolution, right? Is the horizontal offset in the effect always just one pixel-width, or is it more than one pixel-width if you move things fast enough?
The simulated picture that you provide looks like it suffers from an artifact that appears WITHIN moving items that are displayed on an interlaced-scan display. The artifact goes away when the item ceases to move. But these aren't supposed to be interlaced displays. And I assume that you're talking about the built-in LCD in the W510, and not some external display, right? If somehow your display card is in interlaced display mode, then the problem probably won't appear in any screenshot the W510 takes of its own display. So at least that part of such a problem would agree with what you're describing.
So maybe the card is in an interlaced display mode when it's not supposed to be. Such a setting would normally be contained under some sort of "Video" menu in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
And from nVIDIA's website:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/​enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2343&p_created=1231528​...!!&p_li=&p_topview=1
"Graphics card temperatures typically range from 40°C to 90°C."
The only mention of interlacing that I see on their site for that graphics card is in the "Features" section of:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_fx_880​_m_us.html
"PureVideo HD Technology 
NVIDIA® PureVideo® technology is the combination of high-definition video processors and software that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for SD and HD video content. Features include, high-quality scaling, spatial temporal de-interlacing, inverse telecine, and high quality HD video playback from DVD."
Plus there are many references to interlace features in the "NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide" which covers your video card. And those features are also presumably present in the Windows driver as well:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64​/195.36.08/README/README.txt
One such reference is:
"While [it] is possible to apply de-interlacing algorithms to progressive streams using the techniques outlined in the VDPAU documentation, NVIDIA does not recommend doing so. One is likely to introduce more artifacts due to the inverse telecine process than are removed by detection of bad edits etc."
So maybe it's trying to do spatial temporal de-interlacing when it doesn't need to (I once wrote software to do spatial temporal de-interlacing for a thermal camera, and you don't want that to be turned on when it's not supposed to be turned on). It mentions the de-interlacing in connection with a video mixer feature. So that's another possibility.
Anyway, that should keep you busy, if you want to fix it. ;-)  Good luck!