i want to conserve laptop battery

I have a toshiba p200-13z. great machine but a little hard on battery.
I recently bought a nice 4GB sandisc cruzer flash drive.

If i install a game onto the flash drive and run it from there, should my laptop battery power down after 20 mins or whatever? (what i want it to do)

I just want to know if the os is likely to be reading or writing anything from my hard disc while I'm playing games from the flash drive. The idea being so that the laptop will last for longer bus journeys.

Thanks for any help or comments about this.

 

Uhm NO.
The Operating System (OS) is on the HDD and is required for all operations. By running the game from the flash drive you will reduce hdd spinning thus getting a better battery life.
Onwards to getting even more battery life:
-reduce screen brightness
-set power management for optimal/minimal power management
-set all settings in the nvidia control panel/ati control centre for optimising battery life.
-don`t use the wireless or any other usb plugged devices...

This should get a few more hours , 1 or 2 depending on the settings involved.

 

Thanks, I have all the power management up to the last and screen brightness down etc, and only a handfull of services and processes running at any time, the only drain i have left to tackle is the hdd spinning up. plan to eventually put the os onto usb micro drive(not flash) when the price comes down a little more. usb only uses a tricle of power compared to the hard disc.

 

There is always the SSD (solid state drives) which completely remove hdd consumption from spinning...but they cost as much as a new laptop
So tweaking the settings is the best way to go for now.