9. MobileMark 2005, Continued

Some might argue that performance on battery and battery life are unimportant for big honking graphics notebooks that eat batteries like a hungry man eats Cheetos. We disagree. With batteries delivering longer and longer run times, it's now possible to play games, view entire DVDs, use office programs and surf the Web on battery.

The Dell XPS M1710 performed quite well on the MobileMark tests. With its faster CPU/memory combination, it scored an MobileMark 2005 Performance score of 262 compared to the scores of 236 and 211 racked up by Fujitsu's Lifebook N6410 and HP's DV1000T respectively. The Dell also bested the other two computers with an average response time score of .93 seconds.

With its standard 80 Wh battery, the M1710 delivered battery life scores ranging between 2 hours and 24 minutes when playing a DVD to 2 hours and 40 minutes in MobileMark's least challenging Reader benchmark, which involves using a Web browser to view data stored directly on the test computer.

Of course, the notebook's 80 Wh battery gave it an advantage over the other two computers with their 43 Wh batteries. Eighty Wh batteries in both the HP laptop and the Fujitsu notebook would have nearly doubled their battery life scores. Still, well over 2 hours is decent battery life, whatever the capacity of the battery.

We also tested XPS M1710 battery life in relation to the USB 2.0 battery drain problem discussed earlier in this article. We ran the MobileMark 2005 Reader benchmark for each of the four tests shown in the table below. With the patch installed and a USB 2.0 HDD connected to the notebook, the battery delivered 13 extra minutes compared to a situation where the patch was not installed and the same HDD was connected to the computer. Those two instances of 2:37 minutes in the table indicate that the patch isn't taking care of all the battery drain issues, which is, we assume, why Microsoft didn't release the preliminary patch for general use.