15. Battery Life

There is no way the battery life of the two Inspiron 8600 configurations can be compared, merely due to the fact that the two devices have different displays and hard drives.

However, these figures show how much the battery life depends on the application. When games were run at maximum graphics capacity, we did see differences in battery life, but these were within the range of the measurement's repeated accuracy. Either way, there is nothing thrilling about a resulting battery lifetime of less than 90 minutes.

In DVD playback, both systems were very close at a maximum game length of somewhat more than three hours each. Only in continuous playback of a screen presentation did the screen get noticeably dark in the system with NVIDIA's graphics processor.