Netbook Network

Nvidia’s Optimus technology is great for laptop owners – it saves battery life by only turning on your dedicated GPU when you really need it. It works in the background, and is so discrete is very hard to tell when your laptop is switching GPUs. However, for some people like me who want to see whether or not their GPU is on, there’s no way to find out. But with Optimus Tools, you can now easily view whether or not the Nvidia GPU is on or off.It’s simple enough – extract the files, run the correct programs (32 or 64 bit) and the rest is self-explanatory. “NVGPUStateViewer” works as a sort of widget, and “NvOptimusTestViewer” is the full program, displayed above. The applications are indeed portable, so you can carry them around on a flash drive if you wish (for example, you can put it on a system diagnostics drive – which may come in handy for testing Optimus on various applications and devices).

Nvidia Optimus tools can be downloaded here. It’s a self-extracting archive for your convenience – when prompted a password, enter “netbooknetwork.net“.