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Originally Posted by HelloHockeyFans
I'm going to be on a plane trip for 5 hours or so tomorrow and I'm planning on watching a movie or two during my trip on my laptop.
Is there a viewer I should use which will conserve my battery for the trip?
I've heard that Windows Media Player uses a ton of memory and I'm assuming that would eat up the battery faster.
Also, can I put my laptop in some sort of battery conserve mode so it will last longer?
Thanks in advance for the help!
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Depends on a lot of things. Most notebooks have automatic power-saving features that kick in by default when you have no power. They will turn down the speed on your CPU, disable some hardware, etc.
This will help, but probably not enough. There aren't a lot of laptops on the market that can play 5 straight hours of full screen video on a single battery, and there are a few reasons why:
- video is compressed, be it on DVD or a downloaded file. It takes a lot of CPU power to decompress this video and display it on your screen. This generates a lot of heat, and when the heat starts, the fans start.
- any moving parts take a lot of power. You'll save some battery power by copying the DVD to your hard disk before your flight, so your DVD drive doesn't have to run for hours. Fans will be running to keep things cool though, and there's really nothing you can do about that. Some laptops have very good heat dissipation without fans, but not many.
- LCD screens are also power hogs (any screen is). You can increase your battery life by turning down the brightness on your screen, but it still takes lots of juice to run a large (15"+) screen for 5 hours.
Anyway I doubt you'll get 5 hours, but you can do the following to get the most out of the battery
- disable EVERYTHING you aren't using. Disable your network cards, USB ports, ANYTHING you can get away with. Shut down any applications and system tray stuff that you don't need
- turn down LCD brightness
- don't run video from DVD/CD directly, copy it to hard disk
Not sure if using Media Player or not will make a lot of difference, but either way; you should be using VLC Media Player instead. It comes with its own codecs so it can do any type of video you can imagine, and it skips all the bells & whistles that make Windows Media Player such a hog. It's just better in pretty much every way.
Also, leave the laptop on the pull down table instead of your lap if possible, it will heat up quicker and be harder to cool down on your lap. You want the fans to be running as little as possible.