Does ReadyBoost improve Battery Life?

I am thinking about buying "Intel Turbo Memory" and I am wondering if anyone has had experience with it improving battery life. I have read a review on it that looked promising but I'd like a few peoples opinions on it. Also should I go with "Intel Turbo Memory" or just buy a 2GB OCZ 66x SD card and leave it in my card reader all the time and use it for ReadyBoost?

 

No. It would be very minimal in any case, so minute it would not be noticed by the naked eye.

 

FRom wikipedia:
"On laptop computers the performance shifts more in the favor of flash memory, laptop memory being priced relatively higher than that for desktop systems, and with many laptops using relatively slow 4200 rpm and 5400 rpm hard drives. Additionally, on a laptop, the ReadyBoost caching can reduce hard drive access, allowing the hard drive to spin down for increased battery life [5]. Additionally, because of the nature of the power management typically enabled during mobile use of a laptop it is a more power efficient way of increasing equipment productivity."

In theory it will improve your battery life...but I think it is minimal.Try it... please share it with us.

 

I seem to remember John Ratsey saying that when using Ready Boost he was able to get a longer time for DVD playback.

 

DVD playback is a special case. With Ready Boost(or any form of cache for that matter, even HD), it reduces the spinning down/up time of DVD.

However, I very much doubt this is the case for HD as Vista has many "low priority" disk based task almost constantly running in the background, like indexing. So the HD won't have much time being in sleeping mode where the bulk of saving is from.

Beside, I noticed a very undesirable(at least to me) feature of superfetch which also would keep the HD busy. It tries to figure out what is the most frequently used apps and load them to RAM until there is no RAM left. These RAM are released when they are needed by other apps. Once they are released, superfetch would fill them again.

So the HD is kind of busy all the time. In the sense that any memory free operation would mean a reload from HD operation. This cannot be good for battery time.

 

I'm pretty sure the background drive tasks, etc... are aware of the battery state, and won't be running (as much) when on battery.

 

Hey flamenko, I notice from your sig that you have a tweak guide explaining to use ReadyBoost. So even if I do not gain battery life should I still do what im thinking and buy the Intel Turbo thing?

 

If you have more than 2GB of RAM, readyboost will most likely not give you any advantage. Readyboost is really for systems with very low ram.