14. How Much Battery Life Does Mobile TV Cost?

Advertising campaigns always portray mobile TV as a kind of "anywhere, anytime" service. We are shown tech-savvy, energetic people with stylish notebooks lounging comfortably somewhere on the campus of an ivy-league-type university. What the ads don't tell us is that enjoying mobile television also requires a good deal of power, which shortens battery runtime. Of course, we are also not told that some notebooks aren't even capable of supplying a current of one ampere in the PC-Card slot. As a result, some older notebooks simply don't qualify as a host for use with the Aver TV-Hybrid-Cardbus card. Even in the case of newer notebooks, there is no guarantee that the card will work without a problem, since some notebook manufacturers limit the current in the PC-Card to well below one ampere, defying the standard. In this case, the best advice is to "try before you buy" where possible. At any rate, the fault is not Avermedia's.

As far as processor requirements go, Avermedia's card is rather modest. In our experience, it ran just fine on a comparatively slight AMD Mobile Sempron 3000+, with the CPU load never exceeding 60 percent.

An AMD Mobile Sempron 3000+ is powerful enough to use the card's full functionality.