By
Harald Thon,
published on October 25, 2005
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: squeezing, more, life, out, of, your, notebook | Themes: Business Notebooks
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: squeezing, more, life, out, of, your, notebook | Themes: Business Notebooks
Contents
- 1. The Eight-Hour Battery Life Notebook
- 2. Battery Life As A Turnover Multiplier For Vendors
- 3. Battery Life Is Only The Second Most Important Purchase Factor
- 4. Battery Life Is Only The Second Most Important Purchase Factor, Continued
- 5. Intel Claims That The Display And Chipset Consume More Energy Than The CPU
- 6. A Brief Summation Of Battery History And Battery Types
- 7. Higher Energy Density: The Rechargeable Nickel Metal Hydride Battery
- 8. The Li-Ion Battery Isn't Perfect, Either
- 9. Battery Care And Preservation
- 10. Battery In The 'fridge?
- 11. Buyer Beware 1: Old Battery In A New Notebook
- 12. Typical Notebook Batteries
- 13. Frequently-asked Question 1: How Do I Determine My Battery's Capacity?
- 14. Frequently-asked Question 2: How Charged Is My Battery?
- 15. Frequently-asked Question 2: How Charged Is My Battery? Continued
- 16. More on this topic
4. Battery Life Is Only The Second Most Important Purchase Factor, Continued
A direct comparison with the values measured in 2000, taken from Pentium III notebooks with chipsets that include an integrated graphics core demonstrates that the power draw for individual components (or their percentage of overall power consumption) hasn't changed much in the meantime.
That's because processors have become ever more power hungry over the years. Other contributing factors include the introduction of the PCI-Express graphics interface standard and their related GPUs, as well as bigger, higher resolution displays, all of which don't help transform actual notebooks into power-efficient wonders in the world of PCs.
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"Better still, Li-Ion batteries exhibit none of the memory effects associated with the other two types just named."
Neither do NiCad or NiMH batteries, of course, unless you're using them in a geosync satellite power system. With a charging system as smart as the one required for Li-ion or Li-polymer, NiMH batteries don't suffer from overcharge and the resulting voltage depression (what's generally mistaken for a "memory effect" in the association cited). I wouldn't be surprised to see some notebooks returning to NiMH, albeit the new low self-discharge types.