Dell BIOS setting for Laptops

[crazy^millman]

Well ran into something odd. Got a Refurb Dell 7710 laptop Scratch and Dent so New. Hard as I tried to roll it back to Windows 7 from Windows 10 I could not. I couldn't get my money back so I have decided for forge on. Well Kept running into weird things on this laptop with Mastercam 2017 and could not for the life of me figure it out. I started digging into the Video card and found the issue. For some reason Dell has enabled the Video Switching even though the setting states don't do this for Windows 7 and above. They had it enabled so I disabled it. Once I did and fired it back up I had to enable high performance processor in the Nvidia settings and restart, but all my issues have gone away. I couldn't get a .stp file to open, unable to launch MT Simulation and some other odd things. Now all is working as it should. 

 

Just wanted to give everyone as heads up to make sure that BIOS setting is not turned on on your laptop.

[gcode]

Dell puts 2 video cards in their workstation class laptops

a high performance cad/cam card and a low performance intel graphics unit

Their thinking, use the high performance card when you have AC power and the lower performance

when you're on the battery.

I've always found it more trouble than it's worth as I'm on AC power 99% of the time.

I've disabled the video switching and never had another problem with my Dell Precision M4600.

 

However, I did do some Mastercam work in an airport one time, running on battery power

My battery was gone in under an hour.

I ending up sitting on the floor at the airport sharing a wall plug with a fellow traveler

and got quiet a bit of work done waiting for my flight.