Folks, Got a brand new laptop.. complete with 2Gb of RAM. The battery time of the machine is running at about 3 hours... I am doing some travelling soon.. so I was thinkin I'd watch a few movies on the plane... I'm going to do a lot better in terms of battery time by watching DIVX's instead of watching DVD's right? The old DVD drive won't be spinning.. so it will be using less battery eh? But of course the HD will be spinning... so that will use power...or will it? Does anyone know if Media Player or DIVX Player load the video as they need it, or do they just pull the whole file into memory at the start? I was just thinking that I could make use of the 2Gb of RAM by setting up a RAMdisk somehow.. and then putting the divx's I want to watch up onto that.. and then playing em from there... But I'm not sure its necessary if the media players don't access the disk as they are going.... I'm also have Alcohol 120% or Demon Tools... and I'd like to know what happens when you mount an ISO with them.. is it in-memory or just a fancy way to access the ISO file on disk? Finally... if anyone can tell me how to set up a RAMDrive I'd appreciate it... Oh, the laptop is a macbook pro.. and I've dual booted it.. runing OSX and XP Pro... so both options are available there... Thanks Vida
if it is less power usage you are looking for, I would dump the idea of a making a ram disc and maybe use a flash drive. Logic would tell me that to copy the movie to ram, your hd would have to work for the read/write to take place. And if you turn your computer off, everything in your ram is gone. So that would mean, everytime you would have to copy your movie back to ram. If you copied the movie to a flash drive (usb stick) (which you can get them in larger GB today), (while pluged into the wall and not using battery power), you have no moving parts, which would mean less power being used, and that would = more playing time using your battery. just an idea for you.
