Rudy, You Need More RAM on that Dell Laptop
Regarding your latest comments on Marketplace about "Little
Murders": laptop batteries take a beating when the hard drive,
CD-ROM or 3.5" floppy are accessed. Hard drives in particular
drain laptop batteries when laptops don't have enough RAM.
When Windows runs out of physical RAM is creates virtual RAM on
the hard drive. This is referred to as "paging" or "swapping".
Virtual RAM activity causes a hard drive to operate almost
without pause in some cases, thus draining the battery within an
hour.
Bring that laptop up to 128 MB of RAM and Windows will
barely "speak" to the hard drive. My Dell Latitude batteries
(two plugged in at the same time) provide 7-8 hours of service
with 128 MB of RAM. There are a few other tweaks that help,
especially a well defragged hard drive.
Happy Travels,
Peter
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