I just got this laptop about 4 weeks ago and so far it’s been so great! My last one was falling behind, it’s kind of sad how short lived laptops are these days. My new one is a Lenovo ideapad, touch screen, 16 gigs of ram, 500 gig hard drive, touch screen, amazing screen resolution, and two graphics cards. It’s a gaming laptop, but I wanted it for handling my use of Adobe Photoshop CC, Lightroom and possibly Illustrator at the same time (ok..and I got it to play games). My last computer was always letting me down CPU wise and was not upgradable.

However, I’ve had, off and on, issues with the laptop throwing me a blue screen of death when I open Photoshop. We figured out pretty quickly that it had something to do with one of the graphics cards. We experimented with turning off 3D graphics within Photoshop (when it would open), changing the graphics card in the NVIDIA GeForce control panel (under 3D settings, option 2). It was defaulted to use the Intel graphics card (integrated), so I went between trying it on GeForce instead, but still, more often than not, I would get a blue screen, crashing everything I was doing at the time on the computer.

• I also tried rolling back the graphics drivers, holding down CTRL, ALT, SHIFT during Photoshop launch (to reset settings) and no go – advice I had found for semi-related issues on stackoverflow.com but not quite.

The blue screen would not give me a decent enough error message, simply KERNAL_SECURITY_CHECK_ERROR, and even looking in the Event Viewer (find by typing that in the cortana search) for errors, it was hard to tell what exactly was going on. Eventually we noticed a reference to another Adobe Photoshop application in the app list in the NVIDIA control panel, the Adobe Photoshop GPU Sniffer.

So with this new tip in mind, we went back to the NVIDIA GeForce control panel, 3D settings and:

• Clicked “add” next to “1. Select a program to customize:” and found the sniffer.
• Then, since both apps were set to the Intel graphics driver (Auto: integrated), I switched them both to the NVIDIA GeForce driver and so far, everything had been much better.

The NVIDIA GeForce driver will cause the laptop to run a little hotter, but until the issue with compatibility is solved by either Adobe or Windows, it’ll be fine.

This is irrelevant to most of you but hopefully someone out there has the same issue and this helped!