More memory means longer laptop battery life

Picture this: You're finishing a huge project. Just as you start to click Save on your laptop, the screen goes black. Out of power-again.

We've all been there, but there is a way to get longer life from the battery in your laptop. Adding RAM can make your battery last as much as 30% longer!

Laptop battery performance graph
How it works
When you're working on your laptop, it looks for information in your RAM. If your computer doesn't find what it is looking for in RAM, it has to access your hard drive. Unfortunately, your hard drive is not only slower than RAM, it uses approximately 30 times more power than 64MB SDRAM.

The more RAM you have, the less often you'll need to access your hard drive. The less often you access your hard drive, the longer your battery will last.

Laptop Components	Typical Power*
Screen**	6 Watts
Hard Drive Active	4 Watts
Hard Drive Idle	0.1 Watts
SDRAM (32MB)	.12 Watts
SDRAM (64MB)	.13 Watts

* All values are approximate

** For a laptop, the screen represents one of the largest constant power drains on the battery.

Test Results
To test the impact of RAM on laptop battery life, engineers at Micron, Lexar's parent company, simulated standard computer operation on a variety of laptop models. Each model was tested with various levels of SDRAM.

Upgrading from 32MB to 64MB of SDRAM gave an average improvement of approximately 30%. Moving beyond 64 MB gave slight improvements on Windows 98 machines running standard business software. However, if you use software with higher minimum RAM requirements, such as Windows 2000 or Adobe PhotoShop, we expect that you would see much greater improvements by moving up to 128MB.

Get More From Your Laptop
If you've ever been frustrated by a lack of battery power in your laptop, a memory upgrade makes a lot of sense. Your system will be faster. Your battery will last longer. And you'll have more time to finish that next project before your battery runs low.