I managed to luckily sort it out. Sharing my steps since now that I've researched it more I found some other people with similar problems related to laptop gpu's.
The vive will run on pretty much anything. "VR Ready" just means it will run WELL. I've run it on integrated intel gpus on laptops and it runs but just goes at a terrible framerate. (I'm doing development so I just need it to work enough to test code on the road).
SOLUTION: The fix was to go into the bios, disable the nvidia gpu, go back into windows, run the room setup and turn off direct mode.(direct mode is the main issue with split gpu laptops it seems.) This let's you bypass a blocker where the room setup won't let you have the monitor and vive on different gpu's. Now you can see the vive working at a crap framerate. Go back to the bios and enable the nvidia gpu again. Go back to windows and run steamvr. You should now be up and running with the nvidia card powering the vive. And should be set for good. Any hitches after it's been set you should just restart steamvr or the computer.
And the 1050 gpu turned out to work way better than expected too.
Hope this helps someone else too.
