[Tfug] battery life, power management and windows vs linux

[Stephen Hooper]

> I was at a winders vista thing, the microsoft people mentioned that vista
> could use a large, fast usb stick for the swap file area and improve
> performance that way.  I don't know the difference in power, but my guess is
> that a few chips use less than a spinning disk might.  I don't know enough
> about linux to know if it could be configured in the same way.

Yeah... it could.

The better way to do it would be to set up a RAM drive, and then just
page to RAM (if you really need paging at all).

At least that way you aren't powering a USB device, and you don't have
to have a USB device plugged in constantly.

Of course, you could argue that it would be more expensive (if you put
in extra memory), though from a performance viewpoint it seems it
would be much faster; and reeks a lot of trying to out-think the
Operating System... (as you could basically play subtraction games as
well... we aren't limited to a single "paging" device)