Optimus graphics card problems

[biteyleper]

Ok this issue has turned into a bit of an odyssey so I'm making yet another attempt to see if anyone can help resolve it.

Basically I have a gaming laptop custom built from a company called pcs which uses optimus technology to switch between the more energy efficient integrated intel graphics chip for mundane use and a higher performance nvidia gt555m card for gaming purposes. Which is great... when it works.

Initially I had a problem which dragged on for months whereby the game that was the main reason I had bought this system: Total War Napoleon wouldn't recognise the dedicated graphics card and would only run, with obviously mediocre graphics, off the integrated card.

This eventually got resolved when after 6 or so months nvidia deigned to release a beta driver that would communicate between the game and card.

Now however the problems seems to have suddenly returned, only this time it effects all games, not just total war napoleon. None of the games I have currently installed: napoleon and empire total war, crysis 2, portal, the witcher and a civilisation 5 demo from steam will run with the dedicated graphics card.


the problem started suddenly (I hadn't made any relevant changes to my system as far as I'm aware) before the 296.10 (i installed this latest driver in the hope that it might fix the issue) the driver I'd been running before then was, I think, the 290.36 beta but it may have been the 290.53 beta- i have both in my downloads, which had fixed the previous problem of just napoleon total war not running with the dedicated card. But now as I say, nothing will switch to the dedicated card.

I've tried creating seperate nvidia profiles for games and selecting that they always run with the dedicated card, I've tried right clicking to select run with the nvidia graphics processor on the .exe file, I've tried disabling the integrated card in the device manager (which just gave me a blacked out screen until I forced a restart.) And i've tried various differnt drivers from the nvidia website. Nothing has helped.

Just to add to the complication, I did have a malware infection a month or so back (around the same time when the graphics card issue started) which I think was all cleared up with help from the malwarebytes forum. But I was thinking it was unlikely that malware would affect something like a graphics card and i was still able to play games after first noticing the infection so the 2 events were not synchronised. That said, I did have to do a system restore in order to regain control of my computer (this was before I sought help on the forums) could this have maybe had an effect?

Would really appreciate if anyone can offer any guidance,

thanks, Ralph