Let me begin first by describing what “screen tearing” is. Screen tearing happens when you scroll, refresh a page, move to a new page, or something of the like and the screen sort of “tears” and doesn’t refresh all the way, or it artifacts and doesn’t move in some spots. The screen will update as soon as you click in another spot but it is just extremely annoying when you are reading an article and part of the screen doesn’t scroll. You will end up clicking several hundred times to get the screen to refresh and I can say that it is just really, really annoying. I am not sure if this is specific to a certain card, I have a GeForce 8400M by the way, or what but my Google searching seems to allude to the fact that it affects several different lines. The only way I have found to fix this problem is to downgrade to the 173.xx driver series, and then the problem will go away (at least it did for me). I am one who loves having the cutting edge software and all the new bells an whistle, but the screen tearing is just too much to handle. The direct link to the latest release of the 173 series is below, I hope this solves everyone else’s problem as well.
Nvidia Linux Latest 173 Series Driver (this is the x86 architecture version, so if you have a 64 bit chip you will have to navigate to that version)