BACKGROUND:
I have an Acer Aspire V3-571G laptop which has an NVidia GeForce 710M GPU with "Optimus" technology (meaning it is capable of automatically switching between the onboard Intel GPU and the NVidia GPU, in order to optimize battery life)
Recently I installed NVidia's proprietary drivers on Ubuntu (previously I was using nouveau, until I realized that was only using the builtin Intel GPU and wasting the potential of the NVidia GPU).
Starting from then, I've incurred in this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/1353620 that is, the system randomly freezes (i.e. stops responding) from time to time, unless I connect an external monitor, in which case everything works fine.
According to an NVidia technician that replied to a Customer Care ticket I opened, this is due to a complete lack of support of NVidia's linux drivers for Optimus technology. (yes, a technology they created).
According him, disabling the onboard Intel GPU, which is "usually" done via the BIOS ("usually" is what he said), may fix the issue, avoiding the automatic switching between the two GPU's.
QUESTION:
Since there's no way in my computer's BIOS settings to disable Optimus or the onboard GPU so that only the NVidia card is enabled, does anybody know of any way to accomplish that other than the BIOS?
P.S. Please refrain from suggesting Bumblebee, that would be OT. I'll investigate that, but my question here is if there is a way to disable the onboard Intel GPU if such an option is not available in the BIOS.