went from 4gb to 2gb - save battery?

im doing a little experiment. im going from 4gb to 2gb on win 7 32bit

think i'll save a little power on the battery?? the notebook i have has bad battery life. about 100 minutes.

hp g42-230us turion 2 2.3ghz
radeon 4250

anybody have any thoughts or experiences????

 

laptop battery life will decrease with more RAM as obviously the extra RAM needs extra power.

 

And have you thought that less RAM means more HDD caching which means increased HDD power consumption??

This is ridiculous! And has been discussed already:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...548615-does-more-ram-use-more-less-power.html

 

I predict 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001% difference.

 

Me too! Now we only have to establish in which direction and we'll be nominated for science prize

 

I agree, I think you will see little to no difference, and I am willing to bet there will be no solid way to say how much it is affected. I think if anything it will probably decrease battery life, except maybe at idle.

 

Your hard drive will have to work harder, so it will either be a wash or battery life will decrease by such an insignificant amount that it seems like a wash anyways. Consider how many days your laptop will last on a charge while in sleep mode, and that sleep mode leaves the RAM powered, and you will be able to see how insignificant an amount of power it actually consumes.

 

Remove the CPU so that your battery will be saved further.


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In that case........

turn the laptop off and it will maximize the battery life

 

Yes or...

plug it in.

I find maximum battery life is achieved by plugging it in

 

I don't know about that stamar, I am pretty sure that's the best way to get the least battery life.

 

LOOOOOOL some ppl >.< ....
With that thinking .. just take a sledgehammer and hit it a few times ... will make it use less power 100% sure

 

Not true. 18 months plugged in 99% of time (or maybe 97%, I dunno) and still have 97% of battery life...

 

Unfortunately not all batteries are made alike, wish I had yours!

 

With your battery life already being so poor, I doubt the small amount of power you'd save from going to 2 GB of RAM instead of 4 GB will give you more than maybe 5 minutes, if that.

 

ok,

ran prime blend test.

there was hardly any difference in wattage

only about 1-2 watts more on 4gb which is in-line with the power draw of a ddr3 1.5v laptop module.

thanks you my friends for the help and insight.

 

Hey.

With all honesty it's not that necessary. I had 2GB memory and runs 3 hours with thinkpad battery. Recently I made it with 4GB and then it doesn't really make too much difference battery wise. I'm sure they use more power... but how much is that.. comparing to your 5400rpm HDD or a AMD processor running at 2.3GHz? I mean.. Intel can have 25W P series save batteries pretty easily.. Or SuperLFM in Merom T7 series....

 

I agree. Plugged it is best. Modern laptops have much better battery saving features and charging algorithms than older ones. Including simply not topping up the battery at all until it drops lower than, say, 95%, like on the HP8730w. That way it doesn't even get charged for days on end and then, it only gets slight top-off, and the battery never gets warm. And we know that heat is the enemy of batteries.

As for memory using up power - I believe RAM does consume significant amounts of power. On my HP, significant heat is generated in the RAM area. Of course I could be mistaken and it could be coming from somewhere else... Has anyone here taken actual temp measurements?

In any case, hard drives consume more than memory. So if your applications or your OS use a lot of memory, this move will probably be counterproductive.