Turning a notebook into a mp3 player

Hello all,

I have recently bought Acer aspire one netbook. I need it for my school, but since I have a long walk to it, and since I have no money to buy an Ipod or something, I was thinking of listening to music on my Acer. Now, I'd like to know what modifications could I make to it's power options, so my battery would last. For example, is there any software that will let me create a custom profile so all unnecessary operations are stopped while I'm using it to listen to music. Hope you understood my question Thank you

 

Just dont be running any bloatware, there is not much to trim to save power as far as processes.

Your greatest gains will be to make sure to turn down the screen brightness as much as possible or turn the screen off completely and also to under volt the cpu.

Turn off anything that would load the cpu/gpu like visualizations on the media player and even disable aero for the desktop.

 

maybe a light linux distro without gui, disable 1 core, disable wireless, disable display, disable bluetooth,.. disable every thing except hard disc and sound card

 

I find that linux will often not have full support for the hardware and have proper power saving functions so it while functional will not offer the best battery life.

 

I hope you're not going to leave it running in your bag..

 

You could buy an ipod and epoxy it to the top of the laptop.

Edit: Not sure what the solution is, but I'm sure you can get a used CD player for like $10 these days, and CDs are like 5 cents a pop

 

Not a problem with SSD and bag opened to remove the heat

 

This!
Plus, install Linux on a fast SDHC card and store your music collection on the SDHC too. This way you can turn off the HDD completely when only listening music. I did this on my subnotebook before I had a netbook and it gave me another hour of battery life.
Make sure to use a distribution with a kernel before 2.6.38 since 2.6.38 seems to have some regression in power consumption that is not fixed yet.

btw: You don't need an overprized ipod just to play MP3. I just looked it up and could find 2GB players for 15 Euro. Or maybe you know someone who has a spare MP3 player.

And that should keep the OP from trying?

 

I use this in an old notebook,
windows battery life: 4hrs
linux: 6 hrs

thats cause linux let you disable a lot of things, for example disable the display server and 3d acceleration, i was using a cli player: One panel, transparent background | MOC - music on console

 

I used to use my AAO, it's just on a shelf gathering dust now. Turn off the gui, disable the screen when you can, turn off all of the logging, and run in as low a power mode as you can. It's already down below 15W, so there's little power consumption to save. An SSD would save power but that costs $.

 

15W is quite a lot for an Atom-driven netbook. My 12" subnotebook with CCFL backlight, HDD and Core 2 Duo consumes between 13 and 14W on idle (playing music doesn't add much to that). My EEE 901 needs 6-7W under the same circumstances.

 

It's here since .35

 

For the netbook, get an extended battery for it. Netbooks these days can get near whole day run time with a 6-cell battery.

Alternately just pony up for a cheap MP3 player. Playing MP3 music does not actually require an Apple product. I'm just sayin', 'cause some people don't seem to realize that.

 

Works better without an Apple product

More money for music, less for overpriced... stuff.

Zune has a much better pay service as well.

 

sounds to me like a cheap mp3 player might be what you need.

 

I agree
amazon sells cheap mp3 for 25$...

 

Set it to power save/maximum battery mode. Turn off wifi, bluetooth, etc. Set it to not turn off the system when the screen is closed and to not standby or hibernate.

You should get a couple hours of of an Aspire with an Atom Processor that way.

 

I have a laptop which can do just what you want.
Its called ROCK CTX EXTREME PRO and here is a link for quick image:

How does it work? You simply turn it off, press the front special On/Off button and ONLY sound card and CD drive will be active, no cooling, no processing. The front display panel shows tracks, volume, cd's etc, its super design and this laptop replaces whole Hi-Fi set.

So it is definitely possible to turn your laptop into oversized heavy Mp3 player.. just needs the right parts.

Or go for cheap MP3 player from eBay.. or even these forums offer stuff like that for great price!

And when you get some xtra cash, go for Sandisk Sansa MP3's, best sound quality, far better than Apple stuff too ;-)

-Mel