After a frustrating couple of weeks when I recently bought my Dell Precision laptop, I managed to fix an issue where Ubuntu (yes, was NOT using Windows, get serious) would not recognize the video card and would cause all sorts of problems all over the place. I ended up one Saturday morning nearly throwing this thing away, when I managed to find a post about NVIDIA Optimus technology... ( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358963,00.asp ). Now I am a huge advocate of disruptive new stuff, as long as we keep the broader audience in mind. Anyhow, disabling this (which as the BIOS settings state only work on Windows 7 or later), effectively allow the NVIDIA based Ubuntu driver to kick in full force. No need for a trash can anymore thankfully.

As I saw multiple posts all over the place about this, check your BIOS, disable and try the video again to see if this corrects your issues. Best of luck!