Ram drive or hard drive for best laptop battery life?

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D1ffuse

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I have a laptop with pretty good battery life (3.5-4hr). However, I often fly long distances (10-12 hours) on planes and like watching videos on my laptop.

I am looking to get the best possible battery life while watching videos. Would a RAM drive be better for battery life than the video player constantly accessing the hard drive while watching videos?

Would it reduce my laptop's power consumption if I set up, say, a 1gb ram drive on my laptop (it has 2gb of mem) and copied the 700mb video file into it and watched it from there?

Second question: Is anyone aware of how to set up a RAM drive under Windows XP?
 
D1ffuse said:
I have a laptop with pretty good battery life (3.5-4hr). However, I often fly long distances (10-12 hours) on planes and like watching videos on my laptop.

I am looking to get the best possible battery life while watching videos. Would a RAM drive be better for battery life than the video player constantly accessing the hard drive while watching videos?

Would it reduce my laptop's power consumption if I set up, say, a 1gb ram drive on my laptop (it has 2gb of mem) and copied the 700mb video file into it and watched it from there?

Second question: Is anyone aware of how to set up a RAM drive under Windows XP?
Click to expand...

Have a read

Here
 
Bottom line: any power saving would be negligible if any.
 
Turning down your screen brightness a little can save quite a bit of battery power, I often do that on long journeys :thumb:

It might be worthwhile looking at getting a 2nd battery instead :)
 
RAM drive or Hard Drive?

Itsme,
thanks for the link. A wealth of information, but nothing I can see on either of my questions. Still, gave me a few minutes of fun while I searched...

Thanks also to the other two respondants so far. I´m already aware of the various top-level battery saving methods such as turning the screen brightness down, disabling CD drives and removing usb drives and disabling all unnecessary services and background programs. I guess I was looking for the next logical step (before shelling ut for a second battery, which adds more weight to my already overweight cabin bag!)

I´ve done a fair bit of reading on this forum site and a few others, and used google to search for advice on this topic, but it appears there is none to be had. Which makes me think one of two things:
1. No one has thought of the possible battery savings re: RAM drives over hard drives
2. It has been thought of, but is stupid and therefore not worth investigating.

Guess that makes me either a pioneer or a candidate for the crazy house. One way to find out...
 
Last edited:
I am using two linux distros that can play vid files that I have stored in my windows partition . Would a super small linux distro that had that facility and a decent vid player not use a great deal less power that a windos os ??

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