Low Power OS

Ok, so my laptop is done and built. I LOVE. It an extremely powerful laptop with a nice q6600 quad core processor. The only draw back from this is that it is a power hog.

Now, I very rarely do not have it plugged in so this is not a big problem at all, however, when I do rely on battery power (on a plane), the battery lasts about 1 hour.

I know there are some laptops that have a dual boot option (I was thinking it was sony laptops) that booted to a normal OS (Vista in my case) and a tiny low power operating system. The low power OS was pretty much a media player only OS....i.e. it basically turned your laptop into a HUGE ipod.

Anyone have any suggestion for me to get something like this done?

Drew

 

You can get a basic distro of Linux. I believe that's what the big manufacturers use.

 

Well even with a OS that uses less resources, the Q6600 will always draw a lot of power. I have no idea why you built a laptop with a quadcore, especially when there is no laptop graphics card that will pair evenly with it.

Windows XP doesnt use many resources at all, neither does Win 98 or 2000.

 

Yeah, that is what I figured about the power. I'll look into the basic distro of linux.

As for questioning why the q6600 in a laptop. Because of my job, I needed to have some great mobility with my computer, thus, needed a laptop. I however needed a powerful platform to work with my video editing package. Since I frequently use the Adobe CS3 Master collection for audio and video editing, the quad core is extremely useful. These adobe programs when used in Vista take good advantage of the multiple processors. I can be rendering raw DV in Premier Pro while applying audio filters in Audition all at the same time with no hold-ups and in record time.
I'm not using my quad core for video games thus I didn't need it to keep par with my video card. It is for the video editing that I got it and LOVE it.

 

Wouldn't a powerful video card help a lot with the video encoding?

 

Oh...I still have a good powerful video card. I have a GeForce 8700 GT in my laptop. Yeah, it isn't the best on the market right now, but it is defiantly a good card.

As for how the card effects the video editing. From what I've found, the quality of video card has very little effect while editing. The biggest bottelneck I've ever found is the speed of rendering and the ability to "real time" edit both of which are more limited by CPU, RAM, and HDD Speed.