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

Given or co-authored talks and presentations (see also section on lectures below)

• J. Habich, C. Feichtinger, G. Wellein, waLBerla: MPI parallele Implementierung eines LBM Lösers auf dem Tsubame 2.0 GPU Cluster, Seminar Talk, Leibniz Rechenzentrum, München, Germany, Feb. 29th 2012.

• J. Habich, C. Feichtinger, G. Wellein, Hochskalierbarer Lattice Boltzmann Löser für GPGPU Cluster , High Performance Computing Workshop , Leogang, Austria, Feb. 27th 2012.


• G. Wellein, J.Habich, G. Hager, T. Zeiser, Node-level performance of the lattice Boltzmann method on recent multicore CPUs I,
  Parallel CFD Conference 2011, Barcelona, Spain, May 2011.


• G. Wellein, J.Habich, G. Hager, T. Zeiser, Node-level performance of the lattice Boltzmann method on recent multicore CPUs II,
  Parallel CFD Conference 2011, Barcelona, Spain, May 2011.


• J.Habich, C. Feichtinger, G. Wellein, GPGPU implementation of the LBM: Architectural Requirements and Performance Result,
  Parallel CFD Conference 2011, Barcelona, Spain, May 2011.


• C. Feichtinger, J. Habich, H. Köstler, U. Rüde G. Wellein, WaLBerla: Heterogeneous Simulation of Particulate Flows on GPU Clusters,
  Parallel CFD Conference 2011, Barcelona, Spain, May 2011.


• J.Habich, Ch. Feichtinger and G. Wellein, GPU optimizations at RRZE,
  invited Talk, ZISC GPU Workshop, Erlangen, Germany, April, 2011.


• G. Wellein, G. Hager and J.Habich, The Lattice Boltzmann Method: Basic Performance Characteristics and Performance Modeling,
  invited Minisymposia talk, SIAM CSE 2011, Reno, Nevada, USA, March, 2011.


• J.Habich and Ch. Feichtinger, Performance Optimizations for Heterogeneous and Hybrid 3D Lattice Boltzmann Simulations on Highly Parallel On-Chip Architectures,
  invited Minisymposia talk, SIAM CSE 2011, Reno, Nevada, USA, March, 2011.


• J.Habich, Ch. Feichtinger, T. Zeiser, G. Wellein, Optimizations on Highly Parallel On-Chip Architectures: GPUs vs. Multi-Core CPUs (for stencil codes),
  iRMB TU-Braunschweig, invited Seminar talk, Braunschweig, Germany, July 2010.


• J.Habich, Ch. Feichtinger, T. Zeiser, G. Wellein, Optimizations on Highly Parallel On-Chip Architectures: GPUs vs. Multi-Core CPUs (for stencil codes),
  iRMB TU-Braunschweig, invited Seminar talk, Braunschweig, Germany, July 2010.



• J.Habich, Ch. Feichtinger, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein, Performance Modeling and Optimization for 3D Lattice Boltzmann Simulations on Highly Parallel On-Chip Architectures: GPUs Vs. Multi-Core CPUs,
  ECCOMAS CFD Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, June 2010.



• J.Habich, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein, Performance Modeling and Multicore-aware Optimization for 3D Parallel Lattice Boltzmann Simulations,
  Facing the Multicore-Challenge, Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberg, Germany, March 2010.



• J. Habich, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein: Performance Evaluation of Numerical Compute Kernels on GPUs,
  First International Workshop on Computational Engineering - Special Topic Fluid-Structure Interaction, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, October, 2009.



• J.Habich, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein: Towards multicore-aware wavefront parallelization of a lattice Boltzmann flow solver,
  5th Erlangen High-End-Computing Symposium, Erlangen, Germany, June 2009.



• J. Habich, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein: Enabling temporal blocking for a lattice Boltzmann flow solver through multicore-aware wavefront parallelization, submitted to Parallel CFD Conference,
  Moffett Field, California, USA, May 18-22, 2009.



• J. Habich, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, G. Wellein: Speeding up a Lattice Boltzmann Kernel on nVIDIA GPUs,
  First International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing for Engineering (PARENG09-S01), Pecs, Hungary, April 2009.



• J. Habich, G. Hager: Erfahrungsbericht Windows HPC in Erlangen,
  WindowsHPC User Group 2nd Meeting, Dresden, Germany, March 2009.



• J. Habich, G. Hager: Windows CCS im Produktionsbetrieb und erste Erfahrungen mit HPC Server 2008,
  WindowsHPC User Group 1st Meeting, Aachen, Germany, April 2008.


• T. Zeiser, J. Habich, G. Hager, G. Wellein: Vector computers in a world of commodity clusters, massively parallel systems and many-core many-threaded CPUs: recent experience based on advanced lattice Boltzmann flow solvers,
  HLRS Results and Review Workshop, Stuttgart, Germany, September 2008.


• S. Donath, T. Zeiser, G. Hager, J. Habich, G. Wellein: On cache-optimized implementations of the lattice Boltzmann method on complex geometries,
  ASIM, Erlangen, Germany, September 2005.