5. Testing

We use four test suites to benchmark mobile computer battery life and performance: BAPCo's MobileMark 2005 and SYSmark 2004 SE; and FutureMark's PCMark05 and 3DMark05. When a computer doesn't have the necessary graphics features to support higher end graphics or supports such graphics very poorly, we do not run the 3DMark05 benchmarks. We also test laptop displays for brightness, uniformity of brightness and contrast.

For details on the tests see How We Test Laptop and Notebook Computers for Home and Office.

We have changed our mobile computer testing methodology. We used this new methodology to run our tests of the Sony VAIO VGN-T350P and to rerun our tests of the similar Fujitsu Lifebook B6110D and Toshiba Portege R200. We report the results of our tests for all three computers here.

MobileMark 2005 Battery Life And Performance Benchmarks

The MobileMark 2005 benchmarks test how a mobile computer does when running on battery. There are four battery life tests: office productivity, research and reading, DVD playback, and wireless Web browsing. Each test uses real world applications and runs from the time the computer's battery reaches full charge and the power plug is pulled, until the battery is totally discharged; test results are reported in minutes. In addition, MobileMark 2005 calculates two performance values while doing the office productivity test: an overall performance score, and the average response time for the completion of all tasks in the office productivity test. The overall performance score is based on average response time, and is scaled against the performance of a modestly powered reference system that received a score of 100.

The following charts present our MobileMark 2005 test results. Our conclusions follow the charts.