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better battery life out of a laptop

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eleman:
I have this huge laptop with a smallish battery and a not-so-mobile cpu. Therefore I get 2-3 hours of use on a single charge. So I'm trying to be creative with increasing battery life with it.

Of course I did all the usual stuff. The screen brightness is as low as I can use. Power settings are very very conservative.

I thought of replacing the hard drive with an SSD, which would consume a tad less power, but apparently the chipset does not like SSDs, so that wouldn't work.

I'm a translator, so my workload is not heavy on the cpu, but every minute or so, the segment I translate gets written to the disk. So the disk never gets to go to sleep; it's always on.

Then, another idea hit me. What if I made a large ramdrive, and worked on that, letting the disk sleep meanwhile, and at the end of the day, copy the ramdrive back to the disk.

Do you think that would help reducing the power consumption significantly? Would it be worth the bother? Or would I be spending 3 hours to configure a system to a much less reliable state, just to get 5 minutes more battery life?

mouser:
It's an interesting question, but I would be very cautious about having real work changes not saved to disk for long periods.. I wonder if there are ramdisks that automatically save to real disk every hour or so..

Something worth considering is buying a laptop specifically designed for long battery life.  If you aren't very particular about other features you may be able to get a used one cheap on ebay..
Being able to move to an ssd would be a side benefit.

Ath:
+1 on all that mouser said  :Thmbsup:

4wd:
You could work from a small RAM drive, copying the contents to a flash drive every so often.  At the end of the day copy the contents of the flash drive to the HDD.

This should give you better security than running purely from a RAM drive, (in the case of a crash), plus allow the HDD to spin down for a greater length of time.

eleman:
Something worth considering is buying a laptop specifically designed for long battery life.  If you aren't very particular about other features you may be able to get a used one cheap on ebay..
Being able to move to an ssd would be a side benefit.
-mouser (July 10, 2016, 03:17 AM)
--- End quote ---

Uhh... I'm quite peculiar with my hardware preferences. A huge screen, a large keyboard, win7, and a price cap of $400 (really) were the musts dictating the choice. I'm lucky that newegg gave me this one. And I'd rather stick with it, rather than migrate to a win8+ thingie.

BTW, now that I checked the product page again, I realized it has a built-in card reader. Maybe I can use it like a quasi-ssd, to put the hard drive to sleep after boot.

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