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Can I force my laptop to use NVIDIA instead of Intel?

I have a Dell N5110 laptop with integrated Nvidia GeForce GT 525M and an Intel HD Graphics 3000 card; My problem is the default card is the Intel one, and it provides a very bad performance with Windows 8. So can I force to use the Nvidia one all the time including "Desktop Windows Manager" ?

How to diagnose computer lockups and freezes?

I built a desktop computer a couple years back with the following specs:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 6 MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor BX80580Q9300
• Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
• Video Card: Two EVGA 256-P2-N758-TR GeForce 8600GT SCC 256 MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card
• PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
• Memory: Two G.SKILL 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ

Since its inception, the machine has periodically locked up, the regularity having varied over the years from once a day to once a month. Typically, lockups happen once every few days.

By "lockup" I mean my computer just freezes. The screen locks up, I can't move the mouse. Hitting keys on my keyboard that normally turn LEDs on or off on the keyboard (such as Caps Lock) no longer turn the LEDs on or off. If there was music playing at the time of the lockup, noise keeps coming out of the speakers, but it's just the current frequency/note that plays indefinitely. There is no BSOD.

When such a lockup occurs I have to do a hard reboot by either turning off the computer or hitting the reset button.

I have the most recent version of the NVIDIA hardware drivers, and update them semi-regularly, but that hasn't seemed to help. I am currently using Windows 7 x64, but was previously using Windows Server 2003 x64 and having the same lockup issues.

My guess is that it's somehow video driver or motherboard related, but I don't know how to go about diagnosing this problem to narrow down which of the two is the culprit.

Additional information re: cooling Regarding cooling... I've not installed any after-market cooling systems aside from two regular fans I scavenged from an older computer. The fan atop the CPU is the one that shipped with it. One of the two scavenged fans I added it located at the bottom tower of the corner, in an attempt to create some airflow from front to back. The second fan is pointed directly at the two video cards.

SpeedFan installation and readings Per studiohack's suggestion, I installed SpeedFan, which provided the following temperature readings:

• GPU: 63C
• GPU: 65C
• System: 76C
• CPU: 64C
• AUX: 36C
• Core 0: 78C
• Core 1: 76C
• Core 2: 79C
• Core 3: 79C

Update #3: Another Lockup :-( Well, I had another lockup last night. :-( SpeedFan reported the CPU temp at 38 C when it happened, and there was no spike in temperature leading up to the freeze.

One thing I notice is that the freeze seems more likely to happen if I am watching a video. In fact, of the last 5 freezes over the past month, 4 of them have been while watching a video on Flickr. Not necessarily the same video, but a video nevertheless. I don't know if this is just coincidence or if it means anything. (As an aside, each night before bedtime my 2 year old daughter sits on my lap and watches some home videos on Flickr and, in the last month, has learned the phrase, "Uh oh, computer broke.")

Update #4: MemTest86 and 3DMark06 Test Results:

Per suggestions in the comments, I ran the MemTest86 overnight and it cycled through the 8 GB of memory 5 times without error. I also ran the 3DMark06 test without a problem (see my scores at http://3dmark.com/3dm06/15163549).

So... what now? :-)

Any further suggestions on what to check? Is there some way to get a stack trace or something when the computer locks like that?

Resolution

I have never did figure out the particular problems, but based on the suggestions here and elsewhere, I'm presuming it was a motherboard issue. In any event, I recently upgraded my system, buying a new motherbeard, PSU, CPU, and RAM, and that new rig has been working splendidly the past several weeks. I am using the same graphic cards as in the old setup, so I think it's safe to reason that they weren't the cause of the problem.

PC with 32 screen matrix freaks

I've just finished building a new control room at work. It has 32 monitors and the plan was to have a single computer powering it. The old room had a few computers with odd screens keyboards/mice everywhere and decided it was time to simply things and have a single pc - with it been a single operator most of the time.

Theres not an awful lot of demanding stuff running on the machine, some scada packages, IP camera viewing software, office etc.

The issue that im having isnt down to performance. At least I don't think, the computer is of a fairly high spec. It's a HP Z840 with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670's 4 nvidia nvs810s, 256GB of ram and a 500GB SSD. The operating system is windows 10 enterprise 64bit. The screens are all HP Z24n.

My slots are used as follows.

1. PCIe3x4 - None
2. PCIe3x16 - NVS 810 1
3. PCIe3x8 - None
4. PCIe3x16 - NVS 810 2
5. PCIe3x8 - NVS 810 3
6. PCIe3x16 - NVS 810 4
7. PCIe2x4 - None

I've realised after looking at the manual 1 that I should have gpu 3 in slot 3. However the behavior of the machine is strange, I connected all 32 at first and most came on with the windows background and task bar. about 10 had no background but had the taskbar. The mouse moved at a snails pace and I was unable to postion the screens in nvidia control panel as it would crash/freeze. I unpluged the cables from gpus 1 and 2 and managed to get 16 screens on from cards 3 and 4. When I got to screen 21, 5th screen on gpu 2 the machine when crazy again. The mouse started to lag again, and some screens were showing as duplicates of each other.

I've had a look in task manager, I've not seen the cpu or ram go any higher than 4% when it locks up its just nvidia control panel that is not responding.

I'm thinking it must be some sort of bandwidth problem but not sure how to prove this or fix it.

Should I be able to get 32 1920x1200 screens of this hardware?

Is this behavior normal? I will try moving NVS 810 3 to slot 3 and see what difference that makes, any other ideas would be appreciated.

The screens are arranged in a 8 by 4 matrix.

update from 30/07/16

There had been questions about whether I had reached the max horizontal limit for windows so I wanted to give this a test and prove it.

So I uninstalled the video card driver and removed 1 card so I only had cards in slots 2, 4 and 6. I connected up 16 screens in a 8 by 2 matrix to the cards in slots 2 and 6 and it worked ok. The pc was still struggling when usings windows display settings and nvidia control panel. After applying the video settings it took at least a minute to settle and allow me to accept the config. I stretched a window across the whole screen matrix.

I then tried to put a 17th screen on and all hell broke loose again. So as you can see below I added the 17th screen in the middle of the two rows. And applied the settings. The pc took ages to settle and allow me to accept again.

So at this point it the newly added screen is duplicated off the bottom left and windows display settings is showing some freaky 6|17 instead of what the nvidia control panel is showing.

I had a go at building the matrix up 4 x 4 and adding more in. Again I made it to 16 screens with no great shakes still a little struggle waiting for it to settle and apply the config but nothing major.

I connected them to the card as follows

NVS 810 1 - top 2 rows of 4 NVS 810 2 - bottom 2 rows of 4 (dont worry about the white screen,it was just an explore window)

I moved the right side top four and connect 2 of them.

They worked 'ok' however they had black wall papers not like the others. Also when you did like a left click drag to select things it wouldn't clear off. So I could draw blue boxes all over so I knew at this point something was up. For the heck of it I connected the next 2 and it threw all the toys out the pram again. It merged/duplicated the top 2 middle screens.

8/1/16

Ordering 6 x AMD Firepro W600 hopefully will have them for the end of the week and will feed back!

8/4/16

Installed 3 x AMD Firepro W600 and hit the same wall at 16 screens, however it was less flaky to setup compared to the nvidia settings, the amd display settings never crashed and allowed windows display settings to control the screen layout.

Can I safely delete the files created by NVIDIA display drivers?

Every time I install a NVIDIA driver the files get unzipped into C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver. I assume the setup copies the files to another location and this unzipped data is only useful for the installation process.

Are those files safe to delete after the installation completes?

If so, I wonder why NVIDIA doesn't delete the files automatically. I still have the files from 4 patches ago.

Is my GPU dying?

I temporarily disable ECC memory protection on a NVIDIA K20m (device 0 in my node) and now I cannot bring it back to work again. Before that it was working properly with ECC enabled. So, here is what I did: I disabled ECC with

nvidia-smi -i 0 --ecc-config=0

and rebooted. When it came up it showed 100% GPU utilization and it wouldn't start any kernels (it actually already failed when creating the context). The reason was a double bit error. I reset it with

nvidia-smi -i 0 --reset-ecc-errors=0

and rebooted the node. After the reboot the device utilization was 0% and I could start jobs as usual. A few hours later the device showed again a 100% GPU utilization. This time it didn't report a double bit error (not even a single bit error). However, since I couldn't run any job I rebooted the node and it came up with 100% GPU utilization, I can't use it, but reports no bit errors. What's the matter this it?

GPU 0000:02:00.0
    Product Name                : Tesla K20m
    Display Mode                : Disabled
    Persistence Mode            : Enabled
    Driver Model
        Current                 : N/A
        Pending                 : N/A
    Serial Number               : 0324512044699
    GPU UUID                    : GPU-9bfe1aba-1628-a406-3ed5-2af49462a997
    VBIOS Version               : 80.10.11.00.0B
    Inforom Version
        Image Version           : 2081.0208.01.07
        OEM Object              : 1.1
        ECC Object              : 3.0
        Power Management Object : N/A
    GPU Operation Mode
        Current                 : Compute
        Pending                 : Compute
    PCI
        Bus                     : 0x02
        Device                  : 0x00
        Domain                  : 0x0000
        Device Id               : 0x102810DE
        Bus Id                  : 0000:02:00.0
        Sub System Id           : 0x101510DE
        GPU Link Info
            PCIe Generation
                Max             : 2
                Current         : 2
            Link Width
                Max             : 16x
                Current         : 16x
    Fan Speed                   : N/A
    Performance State           : P0
    Clocks Throttle Reasons
        Idle                    : Not Active
        User Defined Clocks     : Not Active
        SW Power Cap            : Not Active
        HW Slowdown             : Not Active
        Unknown                 : Not Active
    Memory Usage
        Total                   : 4799 MB
        Used                    : 12 MB
        Free                    : 4787 MB
    Compute Mode                : Default
    Utilization
        Gpu                     : 100 %
        Memory                  : 0 %
    Ecc Mode
        Current                 : Enabled
        Pending                 : Enabled
    ECC Errors
        Volatile
            Single Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Texture Memory  : 0
                Total           : 0
            Double Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Texture Memory  : 0
                Total           : 0
        Aggregate
            Single Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Texture Memory  : 0
                Total           : 0
            Double Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Texture Memory  : 0
                Total           : 0
    Temperature
        Gpu                     : 30 C
    Power Readings
        Power Management        : Supported
        Power Draw              : 49.51 W
        Power Limit             : 225.00 W
        Default Power Limit     : 225.00 W
        Min Power Limit         : 150.00 W
        Max Power Limit         : 225.00 W
    Clocks
        Graphics                : 758 MHz
        SM                      : 758 MHz
        Memory                  : 2600 MHz
    Applications Clocks
        Graphics                : 705 MHz
        Memory                  : 2600 MHz
    Max Clocks
        Graphics                : 758 MHz
        SM                      : 758 MHz
        Memory                  : 2600 MHz
    Compute Processes           : None

Brightness settings gone, how do I bring it back?

I have a VAIO CW laptop with Windows 7 x64, and after installing new NVIDIA drivers, my screen brightness controls are no longer available. (Not in the control center, not in the power options, buttons don't work even though VAIO's brightness adjust window pops up, etc.).

My display doesn't dim either.

It works fine on other OSes (e.g. Windows 8).

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling a bunch of drivers (even tried installing the factory-default NVIDIA driver) and software (including the VAIO event service), but it doesn't work.

Any idea how to fix this?

Disable Alt + Arrow display flip keyboard shortcut

Whenever I click Alt + Arrow up/Arrow down my screen will do an unwanted flip. I'd like to disable this shortcut behaviour. I've already looked at Super User question How to stop my laptop's screen from rotating when I press Alt + Arrow?.

But Ctrl + Alt + F12 doesn't start any menu for me. How can I fix this problem?

I have an Nvidia graphic card, 2100M, and Windows 7 on a Toshiba computer.

Remove NVIDIA Update and UpdatusUser

Does anyone know how to remove the UpdatusUser user created by installing the NVIDIA driver? Or better yet, how to install the drivers in such a way that UpdatusUser won't even be created?

I have tried choosing custom installation and unchecking NVIDIA Update, but that does not work. Also, I have tried uninstalling NVIDIA update from Programs and features in Control Panel, but that won't remove the UpdatusUser account.

I have also created a post in the NVIDIA forums that contains more images and details: here (please look at the screenshots there), but I didn't get a solution to my problem. I am using Windows 7 x64 and the latest NVIDIA 295.73 driver.

What is the difference between the different nVidia Quadro drivers?

I have a nVidia Quadro FX 1700 graphics card and there are different drivers offered at the nVidia driver page:

• Quadro ODE Graphics Driver
• Quadro Performance Driver
• Quadro Partner Certified Driver

And 2 software specific drivers:

• AutoCAD Performance Driver
• 3ds Max Performance Driver

So my question is: What is the difference between the 3 first drivers and which one is the best for gaming?

EDIT: The Driver I´m currently using is linked here.

How to disable the screen orientation hotkeys in Windows (XP)?

I'm using Eclipse in Windows XP. One of my favorite shortcuts is CTRL+ALT+DOWN (or CTRL+ALT+UP) to duplicate a line.

I just found that on this machine (XP ThinkPad, with NVIDIA graphics driver), this is has the effect of fliping the screen upside down, which I will rarely use.

How can I disable this? Or, if that is difficult, is there a way to give Eclipse hotkeys precedence over any other hotkeys? I'm not sure if this is an OS 'feature' or a background utility, or a function of the graphics driver, but any suggestions that would help me track this down and eliminate it would be appreciated.

I've looked through the choices on the NVIDIA control panel, and I don't find any hotkey options.

Dual monitors - detect if other monitor is on?

I run two separate monitors to the back of my graphics card which happens to accept 2 DVI inputs. I am running Windows 7.

80% of the time, I just require one monitor on, and just use the 2nd monitor for development work.

The problem I have is that sometimes a window can open on the 2nd monitor.
The workaround is to windows key + left arrow to bring it onto the other monitor.

Is there a way for my NVidia graphics card/Windows 7 to automatically understand that the other monitor is powered down, and thus just extend the desktop to the border of the primary monitor that is turned on?

How do I list which applications are currently using the discrete GPU?

I'm (as far as I know) not currently using any graphically intensive applications that needs the discrete GPU, but the keyboard icon that signifies that the discrete GPU is being used is flashing on and off (though staying on most of the time). I've enabled the optimus tray icon, and it also flashes between black-and-white and colors.

Is there a way to list all the applications currently using the discrete GPU?

Why does Nvidia create UpdatusUser account and is this a security issue?

While doing a backup I have found out the existence of an account called UpdatusUser on my Windows 7 box. It doesn't appear in the account management section of the control panel.

Searching on the web it appears to be related to some Nvidia driver.

What is the purpose of this account?

Does it pose some security issue?

In Linux, how do I correctly configure display geometry with multiple monitors on multiple GPUs (Intel and nVidia)?

I want a triple monitor setup to work correctly.

My setup is as follows:

• Linux Mint 16 x64
• Intel Core i5-2500k
• GeForce GTX 560 Ti Cu II
• A monitor on the far right connected to the motherboard (integrated graphics on the i5)
• A central monitor connected to the graphics card
• A monitor on the far left connected to the graphics card

I'm using the following xorg.config

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "DefaultServerLayout" "PrimaryLayout"
    Option "Xinerama" "off"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel HD Graphics 3000"
    Driver     "intel"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Geforce GTX 560 Ti"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "AOC"
    Option "Primary" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Samsung"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "ViewSonic"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Samsung"
    Device "Intel HD Graphics 3000"
    Monitor "Samsung"
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth 24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "AOC"
    Device "Geforce GTX 560 Ti"
    Monitor "AOC"
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth 24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "ViewSonic"
    Device "Geforce GTX 560 Ti"
    Monitor "ViewSonic"
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth 24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier    "PrimaryLayout"
    Screen        "AOC" 0 0 
    Screen        "ViewSonic" LeftOf "AOC"
    Screen        "Samsung" RightOf "AOC"
    InputDevice   "Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice   "Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "SingleLayout"
    Screen "AOC" 0 0
    InputDevice "Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Which has the following effect:

• The far right monitor doesn't work
• The central and left monitors work as expected

A little bit more info:

• I'm on kernel 3.11.0-12-generic
• I'm using nvidia proprietary driver version 331.67

Will it be useful to keep my old video card in my computer?

I currently have a GeForce GTS 250 in my computer, I am replacing it with a GTX 770 (it's a big upgrade). Is there any reason to keep the GTS 250 in my computer in the second PCI Express 16x slot?

I was thinking to use it as a dedicated PhysX card (You can set that up in the Nvidia Control Pannel, the new card is still in the mail so I don't have it hooked up yet) but I did not know if there is any kind of "as slow as its slowest componet" thing I should be aware of that could cause my GTX 770 to slow down.

Will keeping my GTS 250 has a PhysX card help me, hurt me, or do nothing at all?