Updating the Nvidia Driver for the Lenovo Ideapad Z360

For gamers, graphics drivers and graphics cards are the most exciting part of setting up a desktop or selecting a laptop.  For users who focus on productivity, however, a working graphics card with adequate memory (even Intel's integrated chip), is often more than enough.  So, if you're not a gamer, should you update your driver graphics card even when your Adobe and Office applications work fine and your OS hardly hiccups? 

 

The Lenovo Ideapad Z360 is equipped with an Nvidia Optimus-powered GeForce 310M chip with 1GB of discrete VRAM.  The Nvidia Optimus technology allows the Z360 to switch back and forth between the Intel HD graphics card and the Nvidia chip to save on power consumption.  Unfortunately, Linux distributions like Ubuntu and openSUSE cannot take advantage of this feature of the Z360 simply because of Nvidia's lack of drivers for Linux.  On the other hand, Windows 7 (and Windows 8) takes full advantage of Optimus though the results aren't really felt for users like me, who run fairly pedestrian applications like Firefox, IE, Skype, iTunes, CorelDraw, Adobe Creative Suite, and VirtualBox. 

 

 

After one year's use of the Ideapad Z360, I decided to update the Nvidia driver for the following reasons:

1.  Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator prompted for an update that recommended updated graphics drivers.  Admittedly, it was a long time coming – the 64-bit installation of the Adobe suite had been nagging me for weeks and Photoshop experienced a few crashes, which I attributed to recent Adobe updates.

2.  Windows 8 compatibility

3. Possible performance and battery life gains

As a Linux user, I had grown accustomed to not using proprietary drivers, but recently saw the benefits of Nvidia drivers after running tests on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – a new Linux release that failed to achieve even half of the battery life that Windows 7 could achieve with the Nvidia chipset.  As a non-gamer, I never bothered to update drivers even on my old desktop rig, so I was pleasantly surprised when the Nvidia update for the Lenovo was fairly straightforward.  For the Z360, some of the more interesting considerations were the following:

1. Visit the Lenovo Support site, not the Nvidia GeForce drivers site.  Not everyone will find it fun navigating through the various available drivers on the Nvidia site.   

2. Check the release date, the OS (32-bit or 64-bit), and the driver version.  Considering I never updated the driver since early 2011, it was easy to decide to download the December 2011 Nvidia Display release.

3. Nvidia doesn't require users to uninstall the previous driver.

4. The file is fairly large at 154 MB.

 

All in all, the Nvidia process was fairly painless and only required two restarts for Windows 7.  Although I've been running the new driver for only a few days now, the Adobe crashes have disappeared and the Ideapad is running as smoothly as ever.  Even if no advantages were really gained from installing the most recent Nvidia driver, I can rest knowing my graphics card is working at its best and can eventually check if the Z360 when (or if) I'll ever be running Windows 8.  Now, if only Nvidia would provide a solution for Optimus to work on Linux.