Quick question about battery life and processes/RAM

So I am trying to find ways to squeeze a little extra battery life out of my notebook. I was looking through my processes that I have running and I realized a lot of them are things that are unneeded, so I have quite a bit of RAM being used, even when idle. When idle about 1.2GB of RAM is being used by the background processes and I figured that I could eliminate enough of them safely to knock that down to about .7GB. I don't know if this is a stupid question but would taking off this .5GB of RAM have an effect on battery life?

 

Depends.

IMO from my experience(albeit a bit limited, I have a UMPC I bought few months ago), if it impacts CPU utilization, it will affect the battery life. Otherwise, it shouldn't make impact JUST by having the RAM being used.

If that 0.5GB is merely sitting there, I'm pretty sure the system won't care in terms of battery life. If that 0.5GB is something CPU intensive like photoshop running, then yea it will.

You can also replace the "CPU" in my sentences with "GPU" and "Hard Drive".

 

Thanks. I figured that it wouldn't make much of a difference, if any, because the CPU is not even being used when idle,; I just wanted to make sure.

 

It might, if say at some point it exceeds total system memory and starts swapping virtual memory from the drive. Just check it.