W520, Win 2008 R2 & Issues with NVIDIA 2000M & Optimus

[aconnell]

I had this setup running just fine previously before my HDD crashed and I had to rebuild my images. However now I can't figure out what I did and how I got it working. I have two OS' installed on my laptop in a dual boot fashion (Win7 SP1 & Win2k8 R2 SP1). I've got the Win7 image working great but Win2k8 R2 SP1 is giving me fits.

When I have the BIOS set to use DISCRETE (aka: NVIDIA) I was able to install the Optimus driver & the most recent NVIDIA drivers & everything works great.

However when it's set to OPTIMUS or INTEGRATED, I can't get the display drivers updated. The Intel driver I'm pulling from the Lenovo site won't install because it says it isn't supported on the OS:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS014907

When I try to install the NVIDIA drivers (when OPTIMUS is selected), it says it can't until there's an Intel driver installed first.

I can't recall how I got this working last time and I'd really like to avoid going into the BIOS every time I need to go into Win2k8 and setting it to DISCRETE as I prefer to stay in OPTIMUS mode being that it's benefitial on the battery life.

[aconnell · Accepted solution]

Answering my own question...

When you have BIOS display set to OPTIMUS (not DISCRETE / INTEGRATED), install the Windows 7 NVIDIA Optimus drivers:

x64 - http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS014142

x86 - http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS013693

These will install the Intel & NVidia drivers. After you have that, you can grab the latest video drivers from the NVIDIA site & successfully install them (which includes the NVIDIA Control Panel app).

With the drivers installed, you'll be able to set the BIOS to DISCRETE or INTEGRATED and it will find the correct driver on boot as it now has it installed.