Power saving with a ramdisk... woohoo...

Hi,

Though I would share a power saving tip I use which doesn't seem to be in the public domain when battery saving advice is sought.

When wanting to watch a film on my laptop and looking to get the maximum battery life, after doing the normal stuff, I create a ram disk, copy the film to it, watch the film from the ram disk allowing the HDD to spin down most of the time.

Find this saves 1.5w. Not much on a heavy usage computer but gives 15% extra on a CULV/Atom system.

Regards.

 

I used to do the same but for another purpose. When I want to install a program or doing a video rendering or simple defrag my computer I used to threw 1 or 2 series on RAMDisk. However now I usually watch much bigger video files so I do not do this anymore.

 

That is actually a good idea. You'll only expend the energy to copy the file, but it's not spinning the whole time you're watching the movie.

Also, what program do you use for RAMdisk? Gavotte?

 

I for example use Dataram

 

will be difficult for my 1:1 bluray copies at 22gb

but then again, i save power (and nerves) by not watching them from the bluray drive, but ripped to disk. (get rid of the slow java menu stuff, the loading, the ads, and everything.. and the disk hum).

a player could do that on it's own when on battery: precaching a big junk of the movie to let the disk spin down.. in my case part of it, in your case the whole movie.

 

Haha even with 8GB I wouldn't have enough for that.