18. Battery Time, 3D Gaming And Mobilemark 2002

A first glance, it might seem unreasonable to make a direct comparison of battery life between the five test candidates Dell Inspiron XPS, Dell Inspiron9100, Blackbox-M11, Dell Inspiron 8600 and Yakumo Q8M Power64 XD - in the battery benchmark, the Dell and Yakumo devices have a slight advantage due to the mobile CPUs that they use, the Pentium-M and Mobile Athlon64.

Nevertheless, the scores achieved here give us a good idea of how long the battery will last with an M18 notebook equipped with a desktop CPU and widescreen display, compared to a state-of-the-art notebook.

Of course, when under a full load, you probably wouldn't expect DTR systems such as the Inspiron XPS and Inspiron 9100 to work wonders for battery life. However, less than one hour of an action game, as in the case of the Inspiron 9100, is just a little disappointing, to put it mildly.

When typical office applications were used, as offered by the Mobilemark 2002 benchmark suite, the results look somewhat better. Still, these DTR systems with high-performance graphics subsystems and desktop CPUs aren't really appropriate for business use.