Joe - Disable device

Hey guys,

First time, long time, etc.

I have a recently replaced laptop that was my daily driver for a couple years. I had looked at installing PCBSD and FreeBSD proper on it in the past but a dreaded phrase always come up, NVIDIA Optimus.

This laptop (Dell XPS 15 from 2012) is very competant with running PCBSD on it when I tested. It even have the perfect graphics set up, the HDMI port and LVDS both run off the Intel GPU (and possibly the display port, but really, who the hell uses display port?). But the big issue comes with heat, and battery with that even though it's rarely off its plug. The BIOS does not allow you to disable either graphics chip.

So my question is if it is possible to disable a device in software? I've searched this several times in the past but it always leads back to the FreeBSD forums with people telling the OP that they're stupid for wanting to disable something unneeded, although rarely that nicely. Seriously, the FreeBSD forums are cancer, they make the Arch Linux forums seem calm and friendly.

Thanks for everything you do, loyal JB viewer since before "Jupiter Broadcasting" became the proper title and it was just the Linux Action Show and Castablasta.

Sincerely,
Joe in Buffalo.