DVD Drive Vs. HD

[TWILL]

What will give me the most run time on my laptop battery....

Running a DVD from the DVD drive or ripping the DVD then playing the DVD off of the harddrive?

Im not counting the ripping of the DVD to the hard drive as time on the battery.

I know I could sit here and run an experiement, but I dont have time and Ill be leaving on a trip soon and Id like to get the most out of my battery.

Also just out of curiosity when a DVD movie is played, does the DVD drive output go directly to the video card or does it interact with the harddrive then to the video card? I figure it does some interaction with the HD because I need sw like Power DVD to play the DVD. I did play a DVD that was ripped to the HD once and I noticed the HD seemed to be working during the whole playback but when I use the DVD drive I dont notice the HD working as much.

thanks

TWILL

[Zxian]

Hard drive. No question.

Most hard drives draw at most 2.5W. Optical drives are 7-8W on average.

When reading from a DVD, there is usually a buffer on the hard drive to accomodate for switching layers in dual-layered discs, so you'd probably be using both if you were to read from the DVD.

[ripken204]

ya, the hdd big time. if you use both the hdd and dvd drive then it will obviously be using more battery

[TWILL]

Thanks guys

[LiquidSage]

Considering that the display uses 60-90% of your battery, turning down the brightness will give you more time w/o a power cord than worrying about using DVD or HD.

For laptops, programs like DVDIdle Pro are very effective, It will create a 'buffer' (in ram or HD) when playing video. This reduces spin and access time (=more battery life) and minimizes skipping when you are traveling.

It can be a challenge trying to watch a whole movie on a single charge, what I do to help is make sure i set brightness down to something reasonable....turn on Speed-Step since playing just a DVD is not that intensive. I also unplug any PCMCIA cards and turn off built in WIFI. Turning off XP's system restore reduces HD activity and of course turn off the screen-saver as a general rule since that will kill a battery faster than any other program you would likely run . (It takes A LOT of juice to render those 3D pipes and bouncing text messages. )