ok. thank you very much for your help!
the problems you are describing with TuneUp haven't been there since the 2012 version (if I remember right). I would however appreciate an alternative if you have one.
so, should I mark this one as solved? the only thing left to do is to contact their support team and figure out how to disable nVO... which, considering how slow their responses are, should take about a week.
ok... I'm back with an update and maybe my problem/solution would help others.
so, the tech support has been about as helpful as a brick in bowl of soup. I've searched around and found out that my laptop is what you'd call "muxless" meaning that I need the intel GPU for displays and there's no going around that. the only thing that I could do was to set every program I have to run off the nVidia GPU manually (which takes a bit). apparently, me reinstalling windows was one of the good things I did. also, the nVidia Optimus gets messed up really fast with pretty much every update and the only workaround I've found seems to give me some headaches. it seems that I'm supposed to work only with the drivers the manufacturer gives me and never update either the nVidia drivers or the PhysX since these seem to mess up Optimus on my kind of laptop. there is one way I've found for updating my drivers which involves me simply unpacking the drivers without actually installing them and manually selecting the new driver from the folder where it was unpacked. that seems to involve jumping through some hoops so like I said: it gives some headaches.
anyway, thank you very much for all your help Arc. thanks to your indications, I've been free of crashes since my last post.
here's to hoping that what I went through will somehow help others.
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