Abstract: Most gaseous ion lasers run with continuous drive and operate under steady state thermal conditions. They cannot be driven according to the needs of the application, and their kilowatts of waste heat must be removed from the working environment. A fast transient effect, ion loss to the wall of the bore, is dealt with by pre-saturating the wall during novel bore-conditioning pulses applied at startup. Additional improvements provide denser gas during this step, otherwise only small bore tubes could be presaturated. Other improvements provide means for overcoming the transient effect of discharge gas pumping. And a thermal thinning of the column gas is avoided by means of a novel gas density regulation. The result is a switched, dynamically operating gas laser, whose drive can follow the peak needs of the application while its waste heat is averaged to a low output level acceptable in the working environment.