I have the Alienware m14x R2 for about 2 months and have noticed severe performance drops playing various games such as WoW, BF3 and CS:GO. Upon various troubleshooting methods, including the on suite dell doctor, I have installed CPUID software to monitor my CPU and GPU temperatures.

I am having ongoing problems with my computer freezing, and then sometimes 'crashes' and a message pops up that says intel graphics accelerator for windows 8 (r) stopped responding and has been successfully recdovered. Is this wird that it says windows 8 when I'm using windows 7?

The colours appear distorted and flicker very quickly between offset R, G and B. Only the colour white appears stable. The more black on the screen, the more pronounced the flashing and cycling is.