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I'm wondering whether disabling Hardware Acceleration on my card will affect regular web surfing, sql server, and software development. Or is it just video?

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What exactly do you mean by "disabling hardware acceleration on your card"? Are you talking about disabling the dedicated video card and just leaving the onboard graphics? – alex May 24 '11 at 21:45
No - disabling the hardware acceleration feature on the card, as some of my business apps - according to online sources - work better without the accelereation. – Caveatrob May 24 '11 at 22:27
How exactly would you disable hardware acceleration on a card that ultimately provides hardware acceleration? – alex May 24 '11 at 22:29
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Web browsers are now starting to take advantage of hardware acceleration, such as Firefox 4 and IE 9 (and Flash video), turning it off would impact that. The Aero desktop and WPF apps are also hardware accelerated. I woudn't recommend turning it off, you don't really gain anything, apart from maybe 1W less in electricity usage from the GPU.

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The Dell XPS 15z lasts almost an extra hour while using only the onboard graphics; in the end, it depends on what you want out of the PC. – alex May 24 '11 at 21:54
Yeah, if you've got a laptop like that with Optimus etc and can turn off the discrete graphics, it will save battery life. – Spectre May 24 '11 at 21:58
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