How does increasing RAM effect laptop battery life on standby

batteryhibernatelaptopmemorystandby

Just a simple theoretical question:

  • Does increasing the amount of
    physical RAM on a laptop affect the
    battery life while in standby?

I always thought the only real difference between hibernate and standby was that standby still had to power the RAM to keep memory and a tiny bit of CPU, while hibernation allowed the RAM to power off by dumping the memory on hard drive which would keep that data even when turned off (at the cost of time in transporting the data).

Best Answer

Yes, probably. Most RAM on laptops is dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshing in order for its charge not to leak away.

There are a couple of ways that laptops can reduce this:

  1. They can have flash RAM: not a good option, since flash is slower, more expensive and generally more complex than dynamic;
  2. They can swap ram onto the disk: usually not all can be swapped in this way, but if most can, then you need suffer no penalty from the extra RAM. Swapped RAM will take time to be restored when the laptop wakes up.

Modern laptops have a series of states of sleep, which means they store less and less in RAM unswapped.

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