Multimedia without turning on laptop

Other vendors of notebooks offer w/ their laptops the ability to just use the laptop as a multimedia station without having to boot up into windows.

I'm wondering if its possible to do the same with my acer laptop (1694). I'm told its all done using a linux partion that people can choose to opt into? is that true? or must there be a hardware component to allow that to happen?

Also if it is true, how will the battery life be affected, will using a bootup into multimedia allow for lesser power consumption either through the eliminated need to run windows , and also the need for 2d graphics as an interface that doesn't do much sounds a lot less cpu/gpu intensive as say running windows in its full glory.

Another question , is it posible to close up my notebook and still have it play music? i don't really have a stero system so my laptop with its *crap* speakers is all i got for music.

 

From what I can tell, this isn't a DIY option. It's really a gimmick anyway, the screen resolution gets turned way down and the battery savings isn't huge.

You can turn your power settings to do nothing on closing the lid, so music will still play. You jsut have to go to sleep manually in that case.

 

On Acer's website they offer a download of their Arcade software source code which looks to be basically a trimmed down Linux OS. I would assume that it would have wifi turned off, and video settings set low, and anything else that could help reduce power, maybe even cpu frequency scaling set at the lowest rate. I'm sure you could install it to a separate partition and then use a bootloader to choose between Windows and the Arcade mode. I just went back to look for the link to the Arcade software, and they now require a password for, which they didn't before - I may have even downloaded it somewhere because I was thinking of doing this very thing. On their Support & Download page , under Linux Software, it's the Arcade source code link.

 

I don't think playing DVD's without having to start up is a big thing. It's really more of a gimmick like Brian says.

I wouldn't look for or want that feature in my laptop.