Does having more physical RAM used actually consume more power?

My laptop was good for 6 hours last time I used it on battery (a few days ago) now I’ve got an idle app server running, most of the ram is used, and it’s only good for 4.

CPU is ticking over same as always. It’s either that or the flash ads on this site.

more sticks = more power required
Higher density = ever so slightly more power draw per clock cycle too

bottom line, RAM IIRC consumes ~2watts per stick so no, there’s no way that it could account for the drop in battery life

Yup, each bit of memory is like a tiny battery that gets charged hundreds of millions of times a second.

Having said that, the difference in powers seems extreme. Perhaps try screen brightness and other settings as these can hammer the batteries.

The battery life will be affected by the processes running which are keeping your RAM full

Won’t having more RAM mean more stuff is loaded into it so there will be less disk access which is more of a power hog than the RAM, so would agree you need to look elsewhere for your drop in battery life. How old is the battery?

Didn’t think the ads on here were Flash anymore.

Nothing else has changed.. I’m thinking something must be using more CPU somehow.

Although it’s been dying when I’ve been trying to put it to sleep, so I think something could be amiss with power management.

How old is the battery?

The whole PC is only about 8 months old.

Is there a battery calibration util you can run?

I dunno.. it’s Lenovo, but I stripped most of the crap out. No, I stripped ALL of the crap out*. Consequently my blue ‘ThinkVantage’ button doesn’t work. I can live with that, I think.

* way before this battery issue though

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS001322

Maybe.

I’d turned the screen brightness up, and forgotten about it. In stripping out un-necessary stuff I’d turned off the thing that makes the on-screen display work when you use the fn buttons 🙂 Turned it down two notches and now it says 85% used 6 hours remaining!

On the up-side, I bet you now have a lovely tan.