I'm a big fan of Windows 7 power management, but I still have one issue I have to imagine other people run into fairly often as well. I often like to work from the couch, a comfy chair, or other locations that require my laptop to be on my lap. This is a problem, in part due to the fact that I decided I really needed a 7200 RPM hard drive... you could cook an egg on that thing. I think that a partial solution already exists in the form of ReadyBoost. By adding in an SD card or thumb drive, I can definitely cut down on the hard drive activity. However, I would love to see it taken one step further, to make it configurable as part of power management settings. If you want to keep things nice and cool, Windows could more aggressively use ReadyBoost, caching disk writes longer and favoring it for reading even when its performance may be slightly less than the HDD's (as I understand is the case for long sequential reads). This seems like it would be likely to also extend battery life a good bit, although I have not tested it. Then when my laptop was safely back on my desk, I could put it back into a high performance mode where it would select the optimal device to use based on speed rather than power consumption/heat. Whether it gets to this level or not, thanks for putting great features like ReadyBoost out there.

Replace your HDD with a SSD and you will eliminate the heat problem instantly. That's what I did in my laptop and my netbook.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Yeah, unfortunately the cost to do that versus my proposal is over an order of magnitude difference. It's a machine I use for both development and home use, so I would need at least 160-200GB, which right now that's about $250 minimum, whereas an 8GB SDHC card can be found for just under $15. I looked into the Seagate Momentus as an economical middle ground, but for the life of me I just can't figure out why they only offer a 4GB solid state cache option, and it's essentially doing the same thing as ReadyBoost anyway.