Any idea on how to make a laptop run minimally and just play videos?

[david13579]

Let's say I want to go to a park and watch a movie so I'd like to make my laptop run nothing (or almost nothing) and just a video player so I can conserve battery and be able to watch the whole movie(s).

It would need to be something with almost no background processes, able to turn wifi off and able to play video files/DVD. Is there any program that can run at boot time or something and be able to do all this? (what comes to mind is something similar to one of those OS live CDs)

 

[wolfeking]

Hmm.. So you want everything off except what is necessary to run the video? That might get a little complex and need some coding to do. There will not be a program to do it most likely.

WIFI, USB, and several other things can be disabled or set to low power in the BIOS most of the time. If not there is a wifi switch or button to turn that off.

You can extend the battery life quite a bit by dimming the backlight to its lowest setting, and removing any extra drives you have. I know my media bay HDD is worth a good 20 minutes of battery life.

Not sure of anything else that can be done short of cutting processes.

 

[Danny]

Disable the power that is needed to run USB drives, which can usually be found in the BIOS, or if your computer has a GPU disable that was well and run on Integrated Graphics. You should also dim the display, or go into the control panel (If you have W7) and go to battery settings, and you can change your battery "plan" to lowest perfomance/conserving battery. Also make sure to close all background programs such as Skype, Facebook etc.