I'll be making a cross-country plane flight soon and was wondering which method (if any) would give the longest battery life on a laptop. Should I rip my DVD's to the hard drive to watch them, or will running that pretty much constantly use just as much power as watching them off the DVD drive? If there's no difference, I'd probably prefer to rip anyway to avoid having to carry discs along and risk damaging or losing them.

-Chris

Rip em to your hd to conserve power. What's your laptop?

Rip em to your hd to conserve power. What's your laptop?

It's one of the wide-screen Dells (XBR?) about a year old.

My GF is going out a day earlier and has a somewhat older Dell, also, but that is a loaner she only got yesterday just for this trip, so I'm not sure if it is even going to be worth installing software to rip with.

-Chris