Windows 7: Laptop "display driver stopped responding and has recovered" errors

I've been having problems with artifacts (sprinkled dots and rainbow-ish shapes) popping up on my screen whenever I put my laptop to any more demanding use, like games, videos, hi-res images, etc. This leads to the system hanging up, repeated "Driver stopped responding and recovered errors", and eventually a blue screen. If I shutdown my computer and restart it, it tends to go away for a few days before returning to normal.



I ran the Furmark stress test and it immediately caused the above symptoms and I had to stop it. I'm aware that this kind of problem may have several possible causes. I'm hoping maybe someone with a similar system (see my system specs) has overcome this.

I'm open to any suggestions at this point.

Edit: Wow, great timing. I was just trying to play Osmos just now and I got an error message I never noticed before. The game froze up and the "driver stopped responding" message came up but this time I got an Nvidia Open GL error that said "The NVIDIA OpenGL driver lost connection with the display driver and is unable to continue. The application must close. Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html for help. Error code: 8"

Update the driver to latest and check gpu temps