17. Battle Of The Battery

You already know several of the Benchmarks. The ZD BatteryMark had been added to our testing suite. I have tested the battery run down time with different operating system and different settings of the display. The default setting of the operating system will make sure that the notebook will shut down with the last drop of water. At 10% battery capacity the first warnings will pop up and the brightness of the display will be reduced. When you reach 3% battery capacity the operating system will shut down to protect your data. It is like the gas meter of your car. When you are running out of gas while driving at a highway the driving pleasure will find a sudden stop. In my testing I have disabled those protection mechanisms to squeeze out the last bit of energy out of the battery. Just to make sure that the power management doesn't kick in, we came up with our own custom solution (the UVDW-Roll-O-Meter), which we will not disclose here yet.

Two testing procedures are available in this program: Conditioning and Life Test. The conditioning test is a near worse case test with non-stop calculation, display and hard disk access. The life test added some pauses between tasks like a regular user. Those are the moments where the power management can jump in and cut down power consumption to save the valuable battery time.

We will use the worst-case conditioning test for our publication.

The used operating system is also influencing the battery lifetime.

Most shipping notebooks are equipped with Windows98SE or WindowsME. The main reason why most of us at Tom's Hardware Guide use Windows2000 is the stability. We get the additional 5 to 7minutes as a small bonus.

While discussing the power consumption of the CPU and the complete Notebook, the display takes also a vital part. Yes, it consumes plenty of power, but judge for yourself.