I guess someone at nVidia WAS listening after all...
So i installed the latest drivers for my 8400M (290.36) to be able to use some CUDA apps. I got them from laptopvideo2go, applied the modded inf and installed. I'd been using 185.85 modded by Dox for over 2 years as that provided the best performance among a lot of drivers available at that time, including newer ones.
First thing i noticed after installing the new drivers: The powermizer is back! Oh, the horror. And the registry keys weren't even there! Fortunately creating them and setting them to the values they were supposed to be worked for disabling powermizer. Background info: The Powermizer feature on many 8000 series GPUs was notorious for creating big DPCs when stepping down, making annoying glitches in the audio. This was compounded by the fact that the "low" and "medium" performance modes weren't optimized for Windows Aero, so it would switch back and forth all the time.
I then tried out Powermizer Manager and it has this pretty cool feature where it can reset the driver on the fly. I tried enabling powermizer back just for kicks, and to my amazement, not only did the driver restart and powermizer work fine, but it didn't glitch the audio even during the time the display was flashing! This driver restart appears to also be a solution to the "stuck in medium performance mode after GPU-intensive app crash" bug, which would present itself during other situations too, such as resuming from hibernate (standby never worked on this dv9000, i wonder if it works now). Testing with LatencyMon shows that indeed the nvidia driver does not create big DPCs anymore. Hooray, they fixed it!
100-some revisions too late tho. 
The only annoying thing about this driver is that it does this weird thing on lid close/open where it resets the display, making the rightmost icon on the desktop go under its left-hand neighbor.
First thing i noticed after installing the new drivers: The powermizer is back! Oh, the horror. And the registry keys weren't even there! Fortunately creating them and setting them to the values they were supposed to be worked for disabling powermizer. Background info: The Powermizer feature on many 8000 series GPUs was notorious for creating big DPCs when stepping down, making annoying glitches in the audio. This was compounded by the fact that the "low" and "medium" performance modes weren't optimized for Windows Aero, so it would switch back and forth all the time.
I then tried out Powermizer Manager and it has this pretty cool feature where it can reset the driver on the fly. I tried enabling powermizer back just for kicks, and to my amazement, not only did the driver restart and powermizer work fine, but it didn't glitch the audio even during the time the display was flashing! This driver restart appears to also be a solution to the "stuck in medium performance mode after GPU-intensive app crash" bug, which would present itself during other situations too, such as resuming from hibernate (standby never worked on this dv9000, i wonder if it works now). Testing with LatencyMon shows that indeed the nvidia driver does not create big DPCs anymore. Hooray, they fixed it!
100-some revisions too late tho. The only annoying thing about this driver is that it does this weird thing on lid close/open where it resets the display, making the rightmost icon on the desktop go under its left-hand neighbor.
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