Problems With My Dell 17R

Can you get to the Nvidia control panel and set your preferred GPU to the Nvidia chip?

Did you recently reformat the hard drive or have any hardware failure issues like power surge or unexplained different errors?

Hias Guys, maybe i got THE solution.

My Specs: Win7x64 (EFI,SCM), Notebook MSI GS70 Pro, GTX870m, Intel HD 4600
My Prob: Only using integrated Intel HD GFX - no way to activate, switch to dedicated GFX

My solution - works without reboot (!):
After a deep scan - i used sysinternals Tools to understand when optimus is being invoked, and why it cannot start to activate the right GFX choosen in the nvidia control Center.
It is - as i thought - a really simple Problem in the registry.
Each time an appliction starts, nvidia Needs to be triggered to start correctly.
This is done by a registry entry : App_InitDlls
Here you can tell Windows what Needs to be triggered when an app starts.

x32bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows
x64bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows

There you find the link to the NVINIT.DLL or NVINITx.DLL which lets nvidia invoking the right GFX.
...alright...

But under the reg key RequireSignedAppInit_DLLs the System requires a signed DLL to be invoked/triggered - the value of the key is 1 (true).
After Setting this value to 0 (false) - my System runs perfectly!!

Solution:
set the following keys to 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\RequireSignedAppInit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\RequireSignedAppInit

You do not Need to restart the System - you can test it directly!

It seems that Nvidea missed to sign These DLLs ... thats all.


source: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/748213/geforce-drivers/nvidia-optimus-big-problem-with-my-gtx660m/2/

Sounds like a hardware issue. Something is causing intermittent non-communication between the GPU and laptop. Have you dropped the laptop recently? Does it get moved around a lot? The card could be loose or going bad.

did a quick google for you and found this, (honestly had heard of this problem from nvidia optimus stuff before, so was genuinely interested.)

another guy in there says that upgrading from win7 to win8 fixed the issue for him completely, which kind of makes sense with what this guy is saying, if it's a registry problem.

Either the bios setting should work or update the driver for both the nvidia chipset and your motherboard's chipset (the intel one).

Try to grab the updates from nvidia and intel directly and skip your manufacturer (even more so if they're updated fully for those).

Make a system restore point before you fiddle, so you can at least get back to this point.

If the program that manages the card can't see it's there at times then there's something funky going on.

Could always grab a SSD and do a fresh install and slowly migrate the data off the old hard drive.

It sounds to me that the bios is using the intel igp as the first device, go in to the bios and set it to pcg.

Its not just one program, when this happens the chip is nowhere to be seen. Not even in hardware manager.

If I open GeForce Experience [while this is happening] the program says "NVIDA GeForce Experience requires an NIVIDA GPU. Refer to the system requirements." The chip has become totally invisible.

When my machine can see the Nvida chip it uses it. It is set up as the default.

It only uses the I4k when it can't find the 650m.