The NVidia drivers after 343.22 no longer support the NVidia Quadro FX 880M GPU for the ThinkPad W510 so I had to switch to legacy drivers (340-xx).

To get everything working again, I make some changes to my kernel mode settings and my xorg.conf. In /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg and /etc/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf I am now using this:

• 20-nvidia.conf

  Section "Monitor"
      Identifier     "Monitor0"
      VendorName     "Unknown"
      ModelName      "Unknown"
      HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0
      VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0
      Option         "DPMS"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Device"
    Identifier "Nvidia Card"
    Driver "nvidia"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName "Quadro FX 880M:
  
    #Option "NoLogo" "true"
    Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
  
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
      Identifier     "Screen0"
      Device         "Device0"
      Monitor        "Monitor0"
      DefaultDepth    24
      SubSection     "Display"
          Depth       24
      EndSubSection
  EndSection

• syslinux.cfg

  LABEL archnvidia
      MENU LABEL Arch Linux (NVidia)
      LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
      APPEND root=/dev/sda1 rw nomodeset nouveau.modeset=0
      INITRD ../initramfs-linux.img

And in the syslinux.cfg the line DEFAULT arch is now DEFAULT archnvidia to default to the new kernel settings.