I bought an XPS M1710 about a month and a half ago. Its GeForce Go 7900 ran 3D games very well and all was good. Recently, I thought I'd noticed 3D performance drop a little, but couldn't quite place my finger on it. Today I had a crash that prompted me to update the graphics driver, which I hadn't done in a while. I upgraded the 9x.xx driver to the 156.xx series from Dell's website. 3D performance subsequently plummeted - my games now run like slideshows.

Pondering further, I installed the latest 174.xx driver from laptopvideo2go.com. This exhibited the exact same performance problem. I then decided a reinstall of Windows was in order, so put Vista back on from scratch and allowed the system to update from Windows Update. Still, performance was terrible.

Something has definitely changed. My Vista Experience Index is now 2.0 (Graphics) and 2.7 (Gaming Graphics) where they were both once over 5.0. Is this a hardware problem? The laptop is under warranty and can be returned if necessary, but it would be an inconvenience.