Battery consumption affected by expresscard reader? also MS w/ readyboost?

Would be neat if I could just leave the expresscard memory reader in there all the time as I use more SD than MS, but I'm afraid that it would reduce my battery life. Anyone know? BTW- I'm not leaving an SD card in, just the reader.

I'm also using a 2GB Sandisk UltraII memory stick for readyboost and was wondering how much that is affecting battery life compared to the benefit of having readyboost during those times "on battery".

 

As for the readyboost piece...if you feel like it's effecting your battery life...for the times you are using it on battery and need every minute you can get, just pop out the MS Pro Duo and your laptop will chug along as if nothing happened.

Readyboost writes every bit to both the Readyboost media (your MS stick) and your HD so if it can't get to your Readyboost media it just goes to the HD.

Usually once you pop it back in it'll start being used again - worst case you have to go into properties and re-enable it.

As to the expresscard reader, that's a good question...mine's been in there since day 1 but I've never used it! I'm going to remove it tonight and see if it has any effect on battery life - although my guess is it wouldn't unless it was being used.

 

I realize I could just pop the MS card out, but just wondering if anyone had any info about how much readyboost affects battery consumption.

Also I was thinking the same about the expresscard - if there's no card in it to "complete any circuits" then it shouldn't be using any power right? What if something in the card reader itself registers enough to be using power - w/ the plug and play subsystem of windows constantly polling device connectivity status it may just be enough to draw power.

On my previous Dell I had a PCMCIA to CF adapter that I would always keep in, but there were times I thought the system seemed to heat up quite abit in that area so I pulled it out and had less of those issues.

 

Nope. In order to be able to immediately recognize a device the slots are in a sort of standby mode, sort of like your cell phone in voice recognition mode. While this power drain is quite minimal, with several unused slots and devices it can all add up to real, useable battery time.

Leave the card reader in but turn the slot off in device manager to save on power.

When you need it again it is just a click away to turn it back on.

When traveling or on battery I always have the camera, PCMCIA slot, Express slot, Firewire, modem, NIC, and MemoryStick reader all turned off in Device Manager.

Hard to determine an exact figure but I would estimate this adds nearly 1/2 an hour to my overall battery time.

 

That's great advice. Can you tell me how the expresscard slot is labeled in the device manager? I can't seem to find that one.

 

It's at the top of 'Device Manager' under 'Disk Drives'.

If you have no card/reader in the slot then nothing shows up but if you do have a card/reader in the slot then you should see it by name.

For example, the Sony SD/XD/MMC reader that Sony ships with the SZ shows up as 'Sony USB xxxxx'.

 

SONY USB HS-CARD USB Device is what mine was called. Thanks!

 

Thanks for all the info, all.

And concerning the reader taking up juice - that's what I thought, that it WAS somehow using up maybe a bit of power.

When you say it's just "a click" away though, do you mean setting up a power management profile that has all this stuff disabled? (that way you can just click on the battery icon in the tray and switch to that profile, as I'm doing now). In the Vaio power management, I can disable some devices like firewire, optical drive, audio/modem, and LAN in the maximum battery profile, but it doesn't give me the granular control I'd like similar to pausing devices in the device manager.

Are there any other utils out there that give this level of control over devices for power management purposes, but still give the quick profile select capability from the system tray?