W520 - NVIDIA Quadro 1000M remains on even on battery?

Just got my new W520 a couple day ago, and I docked the laptop for the first time last night.

To my surprise, the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M has to remain on in order to drive external monitors through the DVI ports on the dock
(This creates a lot of unnecessary fan noise / heat / power consumption because having an external monitor ≠ using 3D applications)

Anyway, I am unhappy now because if I opened Internet Explorer while the W520 is docked, and I undock the W520, the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M stays on even though now the laptop is running on battery.

In order to let the W520 goes back to using Intel HD graphics, I have to close every IE window (or most any other programs opened while the machine was docked)!!

This is a huge inconvenience! Are there any ways around this?

 

Pretty sure it's been well discused that the Nvidia card has to be on when driving external monitors.

I don't think there's any way around your situation. That's a limitation of the Optimus software.

 

I am now trying to force Internet Explorer to run with "Integrated graphics".

I changed the "Preferred graphics processor" to "Integrated graphics" in the Nvidia control panel under both "Global Settings" and "Program Settings (created a custom profile for iexplorer.exe).

However, this does not seem to make a difference. Both IE9 and Firefox choose to run with NVIDIA regardless (interestingly Chrome likes to stay with Integrated).

Is the "choosing the preferred graphics processor" feature in the W520 buggy? Is this suppose to work at all?

 

I've had a lot of problems with forcing the Optimus mode to do what I want. I've now resorted to using BIOS control. It's the only way I get zero issues and always run with the graphics card that I want. It's not too big a deal for me. I'm usually just using the integrated card. If I'm processing images, or doing something intensive I'll turn on the Nvidia card.

 

Weird, my IE defaults to integrated not discrete.