Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Optimising XP/laptop battery life (Read 4218 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Optimising XP/laptop battery life

If I play MP3's using WMP, it seems to want grab the files a bit at a time so hard disk access is every few seconds and the disk never spins down, shortening battery life. I'va a gig of ram (half a gig free) so much could be cached and the disk spun down (even just the playing track would be a good start!) - a strategy used by portable players.

So *if* WMP can't be made to do this, are there other MP3 playing applications that do this? Wanting to use a laptop as a MP3 player and get maximum batter life (on a flight for example) has got to be a common requirement - even in these days of iPods. Once I have to take my laptop somewhere I'd rather not take an iPod too...

Any ideas?

W

 

Optimising XP/laptop battery life

Reply #1
I think you could just copy your files in a virtual ramdisk, if you find no other answers.
I also think foobar2000 has a "cache files smaller than" somewhere in the options.

*Found it!* It's in "Advanced" it says: "Full file buffering up to (kB)"

I guess you could just set a huge amount, lets say 102 400, that would 100megs.