Optimising XP/laptop battery life Options

[wibbly]

If I play MP3's using WMP, it seems to want grab the files a bit at a time so hard disk access is every few seconds and the disk never spins down, shortening battery life. I'va a gig of ram (half a gig free) so much could be cached and the disk spun down (even just the playing track would be a good start!) - a strategy used by portable players.

So *if* WMP can't be made to do this, are there other MP3 playing applications that do this? Wanting to use a laptop as a MP3 player and get maximum batter life (on a flight for example) has got to be a common requirement - even in these days of iPods. Once I have to take my laptop somewhere I'd rather not take an iPod too...

Any ideas?

W

This post has been edited by wibbly: Feb 1 2007, 23:53

[mat128]

I think you could just copy your files in a virtual ramdisk, if you find no other answers.
I also think foobar2000 has a "cache files smaller than" somewhere in the options.

*Found it!* It's in "Advanced" it says: "Full file buffering up to (kB)"

I guess you could just set a huge amount, lets say 102 400, that would 100megs.