Yes, paranoia pretty much describes it. I've been staring at the installation of the new 306.23 drivers since forever (moreso on its predecessor 301.42). As everyone knows (some painfully), Asus has had us stuck on 296.16 for months. Now normally this wouldn't be affecting me so much, except that I'm seeing people on comps with half my stats play some titles with every single graphic setting set to max with flawless graphics, while I'm getting slowdown on the supposed gaming powerhouse. I tend to take such things personally, since I'm prideful with my Asus.
To mention some titles, it handles WoW, SC2, and Diablo 3 on ultra settings absolutely flawlessly. But the main examples I can use are SW:TOR and GW2, especially the later. So many times, and without there being anything overly exerting happening on screen or even nearby, the framerate just drops, as far down as 10 fps, then after a few moments comes back up. At first I thought it was the hard drive causing a slowdown, but testing that, I found nothing to indicate that it was (both hard drives are regular sata, not SSD). And note that those slowdowns still randomly pop up even with settings down to lower scales.
Now we come back to my paranoia. So many boards, even this one, are filled with horror stories of comps going bonkers when given the new drivers, the least of which were fixed by a rollback, but it's still something I don't want to get into. For me, this is a classic case of "should I leave well enough alone" vs "get the latest driver and things should smooth out".
But the bottom line is I'm looking to find out if my paranoia is baseless, or is it worth a risk to save the honor of a gaming laptop. I mean, isn't it a stab to its pride when you consider something with i7 2.2 GHz, 16Gb ram and 3Gb graphic memory to still suffer from *slowdown*?