Perhaps just uninstalling Nouveau and falling back to the Intel driver, if it’s already installed, is sufficient? Or if that doesn’t work, worst case OP could blacklist Nouveau and and update initramfs? I’m just guessing as long as the Nvidia driver is never actually active perhaps that’s enough to avoid excess power consumption.
OTOH there isn’t much harm in OP keeping Nouveau enabled and seeing how things go though I’m in agreement with you, on an older laptop there’s not much advantage to be gained with the older Nvidia hardware.
Perhaps just uninstalling Nouveau and falling back to the Intel driver, if it’s already installed, is sufficient? Or if that doesn’t work, worst case OP could blacklist Nouveau and and update initramfs? I’m just guessing as long as the Nvidia driver is never actually active perhaps that’s enough to avoid excess power consumption.
OTOH there isn’t much harm in OP keeping Nouveau enabled and seeing how things go though I’m in agreement with you, on an older laptop there’s not much advantage to be gained with the older Nvidia hardware.