Friday, January 31, 2014

Powerpoint 2010 / Office 2010 crash in Windows (8.1) due to Optimus

Recently I discovered that some of my presentations crash on my new laptop running Windows 8.1 and Powerpoint 2010. The error was: "Powerpoint stopped working" or "Powerpoint funktioniert nicht mehr".
Excel and Word worked like a charm, and some older presentations did as well.
So first of all I suspected an error in the presentation file itself and tried it successfully on other machines running Windows 7 and the same office.
I tried some other tests with converting the files back to *.ppt scheme and removing animations and slides.
However, nothing worked.

In the end the problem was GPU related. By default, Office gets launched on the integrated Intel GPU. However, Powerpoint, or at least my highly sophisticated presentation, requires the "real deal" GPU.

I started Powerpoint using the NVIDIA GPU and the Presentation worked on this machine as well


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