Eric the Red

Only people who have a laptop would understand the importance to this program. Here's the introduction.

Your on the airplane, your flight is 4 hours long. Unfortunately your battery only lasts 2 hours. You realize that even if you were to use Media player in windows and listen to music, your battery would quickly diminish.

Here's my idea whether someone has came up with this already or not. I'm thinking that it would be a wonderful/ intelligent idea to have a boot cd that is capable browsing your harddrive for music files and playing them. Note: Without your operating system running in the background.

Just look at your large battery that your laptop is powered by, 96WH of power and your getting only a few hours of music play compare to the ipods AA battery running for 20 hours. I know that there is a quick solution. GO out and buy an ipod. But imagine simulating an ipod on your laptop. The music would be able to be played for days and you would no longer kill your battery in just a few hours when your only intention is to listen to music.

Anyone with me on this?? I'm telling you right now, this software would be very popular.

Benoit

A good way to go about this would to make a live Linux CD that has various media players

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nnxion

Well, that boot CD is still an operating system. The only computer I know of that can do without was the original MIX computer, it ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself.

Some very small version of linux with just a mp3 player maybe though would save a lot of battery. I'm not sure how much you would save though.

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DaWei

Virtually any modern system (at least what you see in laptops and on desktops) doesn't have it's 'real' operating system until it boots, so you can boot anything you like. Unfortunately, the power consumption is only partially reduced by reducing the computational demands. A lot of power is consumed just in running the hardware devices. That's why effective 'sleep' modes power hardware down instead of just letting the processor 'doze'. There is one hell of a lot more to your system than software, I'm sorry to have to say.

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Arevos

Yes, you could get the "Frodo" version of Slax and include the Mp3Blaster module with it. A CLI MP3-player with a minimal Linux OS should be about as low-powered as you could reasonably get. But even so, MP3s need CPU-time to decode, and even if you turn off the screen, there'll still be more power consumption in a laptop than a dedicated MP3 player.

Might be better to pick up a cheap USB-stick MP3 player. They last for hours, and if you can manage with less than a gig of memory, they're pretty cheap too.

Eric the Red

Well lets just say that buying an mp3 player or usb stick wasn't an option, which it isn't. Would you guys agree with

If so, would any of you guys have know where i can find this software?

Benoit

It isn't too hard to make a live Gentoo CD

www.gentoo.org

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Dameon

How do you plan to save any measurable amount of power this way? What is the difference between running off a cd and booting from HD? Either one will spin up when in use and draw power. Your music will likely be on your HD anyway, so you will be running both instead of just one. Perhaps you should have more than one battery?

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Eric the Red

well if you booted from the CD i'm thinking that if you have all that information transfered to ram or HD at a specific point in bootup then the cd can stop spinning. Does linux do this for you?

BTW this isn't about getting more batteries, it's about making the most of your battery.

Booooze

Very interesting. I'm just curious to know how much of your battery you would save. I think Dawei is right. A lot of power will go towards powering devices you probably won't be using. How you would turn those off I don't know. Using a Linux system is obviously the way to go, as it won't use as much consumption as a windows OS. (and you can limit it more). If you happen to get this idea working, let me know, im curious to see the difference in saved power :p . But the time you put into it, probably won't be worth it. It would be easier to buy a mp3 player or ipod. Hell, even a cd player would do. As far as I'm concerned, if you take a laptop on a plane, you use it for working or games or something. not JUST playing music....lol. Most people on planes listen to music while they sleep. It's uncomfortable enough as it is, without having a big bulky laptop sitting on your lap.