Why is Blender 2.8.1 constantly crashing when I select CUDA and Blender is not even in rendered view? I am a beginner to Blender. It has been working perfectly fine until yesterday when it suddenly started crashing when I select CUDA for rendering. I have even tried being in solid view so that is not even rendering shading/textures and it still crashes! I have repaired the software and reinstalled it all together. Could the blend-file possibly be corrupt?
I have a Razer Blade Stealth with an Intel Core i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz with an external GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8.0 GB. The memory on my computer itself is 16gb.
I am mostly confused on how it was working well the other day and now it will not even let me select any CUDA selections.
P.S. This is for using Cycles (which was previously working). It does this even with the default factory settings.
If you open the default blender file and it crashes on Cycles, you know it's probably not a corrupt blend file unless you saved user defaults with some setup that it doesn't like. Blender 2.82a is out with bug fixes and new features so I highly recommend getting that instead of using 2.81. Using this new version should also reset you default blend file in case you saved user defaults with corrupt settings.

Even a simple shutdown and reboot of your machine can help. You can also try unplugging unnecessary peripherals and re-seating the connections of any peripherals that are questionable (you mentioned you're using an external GPU). 

If that doesn't work then getting the most recent everything (software driver updates, firmware updates, system software updates, and 3d software updates as mentioned before) could help. Best wishes!