Okay so I have an alienware laptop with an i7 CPU Q 820 @ 1.73GHz  (Whatever the hell that means), 4 GB of RAM, and a GTx 260m.

I recently purchased Starcraft 2 and mostly everything is going great except for two really annoying things:

1. Whenever I try to play a cutscene in the campaign it appears all distorted and blacked out. I can still make out certain details and the audio is fine but most, if not all, of the video is entirely discernible.

2. Whenever I plug in my power cable to my laptop the games runs at a significantly slower speed which is really ticking me off. My laptop runs out of battery in like an hour when I am playing games so having it plugged in is imperative.

If anyone knows why these two things are happening I would be very grateful.

1. Try updating your graphics card's drivers from Nvidia's site.

2. I have no idea, just a guess: You wouldn't happen to have any power saving on when plugged in? That wouldn't make any sense... But I suppose it could cause a problem like that.

Thanks man I will try both

Okay so installing the drivers worked (Thank You!) but I still have the problem of my power cable lowering performance. I tried the power settings thing but all I could find were how to change my power settings from balanced to High Performance (Which did nothing).

Do you have any idea where I could find the settings you were talking about? I am running Windows 7.

PS Thanks for being patient with a PC noob

For the slow speed, try plugging in USB drives to increase your RAM. Here is a guide:

http://www.reviewsaurus.com/tips-tricks/windows-vista-use-your-flash-drive-as-ram/

It's for Vista, but win7 should be similar.

Alienware may make (and have pre-installed) a power control program. Can you post a screenshot of your control panel and start menu and I'll see if I notice something in that. It would be wierd to use low preformance mode while plugged in, those are normally for batteries but something wierd may have happened.

He said he has 4 GB of ram for god's sake.

More RAM is never a bad thing. Look at how much I have.

Lack of RAM doesn't explain why it runs slower when plugged.

Vectorferret's idea makes sense, they must have gotten powersaving backwards.