2. Initial Trial Results

For our first series of trials, we used a Toshiba Satellite S2800-500 that was about a year old. Its battery indicates that it was manufactured in January of 2001, and must therefore already be more than four years old (though with only one year of use under its belt).

To make sure the load on the battery was maximized (so as to discharge it as quickly as possible) we turned the backlight in the TFT display up to maximum brightness. We kept the notebook's CPU heavily and continuously loaded, with the help of a program named Prime95 (V2.38), which calculates large prime numbers.

Thanks to the Torture-Tests in Prime 95, the CPU stayed loaded at all times.

To begin with, we ran the notebook on battery through five charge/discharge cycles without BatteryLife Activator. Then we covered one side of the battery with foil as specified in the product instructions.

The four-year-old battery from the Toshiba S2800-500, with the Batterylife Activator foil attached.

We then proceeded to take the notebook battery through nine more charge/discharge cycles. We took all measurements in a climate-controlled office where a constant temperature of 70°F (21°C) was maintained, to minimize the effects that ambient temperature variations can have on battery life. For each cycle, we charged the notebook battery all night long, to make sure that the battery was indeed fully charged. Starting with our very first measurement, we used a tool named BatteryMon2.0 from Passmark to measure battery life. We also used the same tool to record its measurements into a text file during the entire test period.

The results of all fourteen sets of measurements (5 before installing Batterylife Activator, 9 afterward) were truly sobering.

Instead of increasing battery life, the product appears to show exactly the opposite effect in our test series! Starting at a level of about 30 minutes of charge for an untreated battery, after all 14 tests, battery life lasted about 25 minutes. This indicates a loss of 17% of battery life over the course of these tests.