R3: On-board & discrete graphics using different color profiles

Alienware M17X R3
Ordered late Jan 2012
Received early Feb 2012
Intel i7-2860QM
GeForce GTX 580M

I hope someone can help, because I am on the verge of returning a laptop that I have, for the most part, enjoyed using.

Upon receiving the laptop, I immediately replaced the drive with an SSD, re-installed the OS from scratch and then calibrated the laptop's display using an "X-rite i1 Match" color calibration device. I'm a professional photographer and color accuracy is very important to me.

The problem is, i'm assuming, the X-rite calibrated color for the intel onboard, and not the geforce.

If this only meant that video games would be using the "bad" color profile, I wouldn't really mind. However, while even on the desktop doing every day tasks, the color profile will toggle and spend a majority of the time using the wrong profile. This is extremely annoying.

It will often do this right after loggin into Windows; it will start with the right profile then immediately switch to the "uncalibrated" profile. It also does this after playing a video game (Steam, and Counter-Strike). After I exit Steam and return to the Desktop, the wrong profile is running.

I don't know what triggers the above toggling, but a simple yet momentary fix is to go back into Control Panel, select the color profile I created and make it the default again(redundant, because it's already listed as the default).

Does anyone know how to fix this? I wish I could just make the 580m GTX run full time.

Thanks

 

I found a new occurrence of this problem. I just purchased BF3 and grabbed EA/Origin to download the game. As soon as I started Origin and clicked to download BF3, the color profile changed. It has toggled twice more since then, leaving me stuck on the incorrect "bluish" profile.

 

There is also a colour calibration thing at the NVidia control panel. You can try to calibrate the GeForce card using that feature.

 

it works pretty well, the only problem with it is the calibrated settings don't work with games, but desktop software should work fine.

Edit: this is what it looks like under the nvidia control panel

 

Thanks guys. Unfortunately, it still reverts to some Windows default color profile.

I did a little research, and it looks like it's a problem with Windows:

Windows 7 reseting color profile

Many of those users have described some of the exact issues that I am having and unfortunately there is no resolution. This is really unbelievable.

 

If you have a non-3D version, you may try using the modded A08 BIOS and disabling the integrated GPU to just run on the NVIDIA card. That way there is no switching. Worth a shot at least.

 

^ would prob fix your issue if you really dont need the battery life. Just make sure you turn it off correctly or you might need to blind flash the bios if it goes wrong.

 

I am not 100% sure that it will do it, but I feel like UltraMon has a color profile feature to always force a certain profile. It basically overrides a lot of the windows settings of monitor management. At the very least I think you could set your profile up in UltraMon and then make a hotkey to reload it. When it changes you just hit the hotkey and fix it instantly.

EDIT: I think what you want in UltraMon is display profiles. You should be able to get a solution with it. They are generally used when you connect multiple monitors and want separate profiles for each monitor loaded automatically when you plug them in. It should let you fix your problem though.