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better battery life out of a laptop

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f0dder:
Hmm. I think you may find with most RAMdrives nowadays that stability is probably not an issue - unless the OS is unstable, of course.    :D
-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)
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Or somebody trips over your power chord, or there's an outage, or if you just happen to be unlucky and get that once-in-a-blue-moon-BSOD. Windows is pretty stable these days, as long as you're running Vista or later, but bad things can happen. I'm not very fond of losing work.

Sure, you can use a ramdisk that flushes to disk at set intervals, but then you still have the drive spinning up and down every now and then. Doing that too often is not good for drive health, and losing 30 minutes of work can be a real bummer.

I do use a flush-to-disk ramdrive myself, but only for %TEMP% and my Firefox profile - and it's backed up with Crashplan. I can live with losing half an hour of browsing history, but not a lot more than that.

2. ...Screen is definitely the biggest power drain, especially when you're not running anything compute-intensive
-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)
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Yes. I've always assumed this to be likely, though I didn't collect any data to back it up.
-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)
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I've measured light/dark difference (wall out let level), and it was quite noticable for both CRT and TFT/LED screens. Can't remember just how much it was, but it was enough that it's something you'd consider for a laptop screen - but not enough that I'd be worried about cost using my desktop machine :)

However, I do wonder what hard disk drives you have had that reduced your QOL by vibrating or being too noisy.    :tellme:
I mean, I have never experienced such problems on a laptop hard drive (even failing drives), over the years. It's generally the fan(s) that will tend to vibrate and/or become too noisy, because the heat-exchanger is clogged-up by bits of airborne fluff and flakes of dead skin to the extent that the waste temperature rises through lack of adequate cooling, so more power is fed to the fans to improve the cooling. Taking apart and thoroughly cleaning the heat-exchanger grill, the fan enclosure (and the fan blades too), and a shot of CRC on the fan spindle usually transforms it into a cool and as-good-as-new state, believe me.    8)
-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)
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For all HDD-based laptops I've used, HDD rotation has produced noticable vibration, and most of them noise as well. Whereas have almost been louder than the HDD spinning noise, the spinning noise is a lot more high-pitched, which is a noise profile that annoys me a lot more than the fan noise. The clicking noise of moving the actuator arm also tends to be louder than the fan, but that noise doesn't really annoy me.

At any rate, swapping your HDD for a SSD reduced both noise and vibration - it's a win/win situation. Will probably also reduce heat, but that one depends a bit on the drive. Last time I did research, most SSDs tend to have a constant (although small) power drain even in idle, whereas HDDs go to about 0 when they're spun down... and some of the faster SSDs could guzzle a lot of juice and get moderately hot.

eleman:
Do we have a way of checking if the disk has spinned down or not? It is so silent that I can't discern spin-up/down.

mouser:
f0dder's advice all sounds right to me.

very smart changing to white on black color schemes -- i guess it shouldn't be surprising how much power that saves but it still is.  good tip for all of us looking to conserve battery.

IainB:
...Or somebody trips over your power chord, or there's an outage, or if you just happen to be unlucky and get that once-in-a-blue-moon-BSOD. Windows is pretty stable these days, as long as you're running Vista or later, but bad things can happen. I'm not very fond of losing work.
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-f0dder (July 18, 2016, 08:54 AM)
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My comments were framed in the context of laptops (with batteries included - as per the opening post) ... so, "...somebody trips over your power chord" would probably be unlikely to be an issue.  In fact, that 's one of the things that I got to really appreciate about laptops when, some years back whilst I was working in Manila (Philippines) where they had a horrendously unstable power grid, with brownouts regularly occurring, and normal grid supply was spiky anyway, my trusty laptop was isolated from any such power-supply problems. (Having access to and use of a reliable laptop computer at such times was an essential job requirement.)

The possibility of BSOD events was what I was obliquely referring to with "...unless the OS is unstable, of course." I usually recommend a risk-averse approach. If the system gets regular BSODs then system stability is an issue and a risk, and I would not necessarily recommend using a RAMdisk until that issue/risk had been addressed/mitigated. Similarly, if work that was being done on the laptop was mission-critical and (say) a BSOD event was untenable, then I would generally only recommend a RAMdisk for \Temp (at the very most).
To put things into perspective: Similarly, if work that was mission-critical was being carried out on a laptop, then I would be skeptical of that system being necessarily conducive to passing for a pukka risk-averse approach anyway.

For me, inherent system efficiency and minimal risk of system outage and/or data loss tend to be 2 main criteria for using a laptop. I would be ambivalent towards the idea of what you mention (though personally I would prefer to avoid time-consuming flush intervals and would opt for a hard disk) where you write:
Sure, you can use a ramdisk that flushes to disk at set intervals, but then you still have the drive spinning up and down every now and then. Doing that too often is not good for drive health, and losing 30 minutes of work can be a real bummer.
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Similarly, on any computer system, if a loss of some primary data store, for example (say) browser history, is really untenable because it is (say) mission-critical, then I would recommend an auto-logging or syncing of a trailing parallel duplicate/secondary cache - to hard disk or SSD - and regular back-up of both primary and secondary.
My above comment To put things into perspective for laptops would also apply here though, of course, and I would add the need for disk encryption.

My idea of an ideal and risk-averse laptop system would probably be a Tandem Non-Stop laptop (with secondary/backup batteries included!) - if there ever were such a thing.   ;D
I don't expect it would be very energy-efficient though...    :-[

IainB:
Some useful information from Hard Disk Sentinel - laptop disk power requirements displayed on Hard Disk Sentinel Information tab:

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