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I have a fairly lengthy road trip comming up, and would like to take my laptop with me to entertain me for at least half the trip.
usual battery life I can get out of my macbook with wifi/bluetooth off and dim screen is about 3 hours.
my question is: will using a usb flash drive with movies on it save me more battery, than having to run it off the laptops hard drive? or does the usb port pull significant power either way.
Yeah it'll help. But you can get a power inverter for the cig lighter for like $20.....
:werd: also dim your screen down if you canQuote:
Originally posted by ZiG-87
Yeah it'll help. But you can get a power inverter for the cig lighter for like $20.....
buy another battery if it's not one of the newest gen ones :dunno:
I should have mentioned I'll be taking the ride through Greyhound ~5 hours.Quote:
Originally posted by ZiG-87
Yeah it'll help. But you can get a power inverter for the cig lighter for like $20.....
Yeah, like I said bluetooth/wifi/dim screen....any other points?Quote:
Originally posted by G-ZUS
:werd: also dim your screen down if you can
:( it is the new aluminum gen.Quote:
Originally posted by eglove
buy another battery if it's not one of the newest gen ones :dunno:
Quote:
Originally posted by sm91
I should have mentioned I'll be taking the ride through Greyhound ~5 hours.
Oh. Then... power inverter + small car battery? :P
Dont use your wifi / bluetooth / cdrom / screen dim / no antivirus running (makes harddrive spin extra more :D ) / basically close everything except 1 program.
The problem with running movies off of a flash drive is that a lot of background services will end up using the hard drive every now and then. This will prevent the hard drive from entering it's power saving spin-down mode.Quote:
Originally posted by sm91
I have a fairly lengthy road trip comming up, and would like to take my laptop with me to entertain me for at least half the trip.
usual battery life I can get out of my macbook with wifi/bluetooth off and dim screen is about 3 hours.
my question is: will using a usb flash drive with movies on it save me more battery, than having to run it off the laptops hard drive? or does the usb port pull significant power either way.
What you can do though, is install a Linux-live distribution to the USB stick, and boot directly off of that. You will want to use Linux's "Laptop Mode Tools" to enable the power saving features in Linux.
Also, if you are watching movies, try and avoid H.264 movies. These require a lot of processing power to decode and as a result will eat up your battery.
Last, make sure your vents get a lot of air flow. The more you can avoid running the cooling fans, the longer your battery will last.