Since Sony has been declared the winner in the High Definition format war, there are many companies scrambling to add this awesome new toy to our computers and laptops. Anyone that had the first generation of Blu-ray drives on their laptops knows that if you were going to play a Blu-ray disc you had better not run to far from a power outlet.

One 2 hour movie would suck your battery to half power or less. The reason for this was from the fact that the laser in the Blu-ray drive is very powerful requiring a corresponding amount of power to run. The image decoding and processing was also handled primarily by the CPU of the computer thereby requiring a fairly high-end computer to simply run the thing.

According to the Blu-ray Disc Association that has been “fixed and addressed” by allocating some of the required decoding to the graphics processors taking some of the burden off of the main processor. Coupling that with some of the new graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI the power consumption is slowly coming down. Dell is even bragging that they have a laptop battery that will play up to 4.5 hours of Blu-ray Entertainment. What about you? Have you jumped into the Blu-ray bandwagon? How does your notebook handle the power drain?

Written By:
  Ken

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