Not enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use.
When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM.
Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysql, Filezilla Server, hMailServer, BIND DNS, VNC/TeamViewer (I forgot which), µTorrent with a webinterface, and probably something else I'm forgetting. All of this software ran perfectly fine together. I think my website (self-written php blog which did a few database queries on every pageload) even hit the HN frontpage once and it survived just fine.
The point? Non-graphical applications rock in performance compared to something that has to render stuff. Removing the screen probably does nothing to stop applications from trying to render fonts, images, etc. Doing that would probably increase laptop's battery lives to a full work week (I mean, look at phones, and they have more than enough processing power for this, with a fifth or tenth of a laptop battery because of their size).
That saves some, I've tried it a few times in the past and it doesn't help as much as I had hoped (perhaps 30%). I am sure that when eliminating all visual processing we could achieve something like 200% without much effort.
That would mean my computer was spending 50% of it's battery life displaying on the screen, which I'm afraid is clearly untrue. If not running games it's less than 5%.
When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM.
Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysql, Filezilla Server, hMailServer, BIND DNS, VNC/TeamViewer (I forgot which), µTorrent with a webinterface, and probably something else I'm forgetting. All of this software ran perfectly fine together. I think my website (self-written php blog which did a few database queries on every pageload) even hit the HN frontpage once and it survived just fine.
The point? Non-graphical applications rock in performance compared to something that has to render stuff. Removing the screen probably does nothing to stop applications from trying to render fonts, images, etc. Doing that would probably increase laptop's battery lives to a full work week (I mean, look at phones, and they have more than enough processing power for this, with a fifth or tenth of a laptop battery because of their size).