Comment by wtallis

It might be more fair to say that there's simply no standard way to do power management for discrete GPUs in a laptop, or to integrate such power management with Windows and whatever power management it's trying to do. And the lack of a clear "right" way to do things means laptop OEMs use this area for product differentiation with their own shitty special sauce software and firmware hacks.

If installing drivers that come directly from NVIDIA onto a laptop can cause that laptop's GPU to overheat in the sense of getting so hot it fails to function properly or has degraded reliability, that's entirely NVIDIA's fault. If by "overheating" you just mean drawing more power and causing the fans to get louder than they would in an out of the box configuration, the blame for that should be shared between NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the laptop OEM, but you shouldn't blame the user for doing something that should work and would work if those three vendors could cooperate.