Which eats up more battery on a laptop?

[gizbug]

Which will use more battery? Movie on the HD or movie running from the dvd drive? Or is there no difference?

 

[AllGamer]

none of the above

Your LCD and your CPU

 

[gizbug]

Thanks

 

[ForumMaster]

i'd think the dvd drive requires less juice then a hdd but AllGamer is right, the LCD is the biggest hogger of juice.

 

[AllGamer]

FYI.... lowering Brightness and/or Contrast does not help you save power
just in case some one thinks that helps reduce the power consumption 😉

 

[oog]

i would expect that running the movie from the hdd would use less power, but i have nothing to back that up. this assumes that you're going with the same encoding type as is on the dvd. if you choose a codec that requires more CPU power to decode, then the comparison may stack up differently.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Probably no difference at all. From HDD means the HDD is using a little more than at idle since it is reading. From DVD drive means the HDD is pretty much idle but now you have the DVD drive running. Odds are, it makes no difference either way.

@ AllGamer, if lowering brightness doesn't save battery power, then why did I get a good 15-20 minutes more life when I turned the brightness down a few notches? 😉

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: AllGamer
FYI.... lowering Brightness and/or Contrast does not help you save power
just in case some one thinks that helps reduce the power consumption 😉

Brightness does. Please post your benchies if you want to make absurd claims like this.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
@ AllGamer, if lowering brightness doesn't save battery power, then why did I get a good 15-20 minutes more life when I turned the brightness down a few notches? 😉

Right - and why is that a specific power saving option in Thinkpads with Vista?

 

[Slugbait]

A program called DVDIdle has been around for a few years, which claims their caching to the hard drive/RAM can extend battery life up to 30%. So this would indicate that you'd save at least a bit of juice running a movie off the hard drive...or maybe not.