Squeezing More Life Out of Your Notebook's Battery Part II
We were surprised by the many disparate sources of a notebook's battery drain. The complex interplay between software, components and peripherals during the tests we ran provided the basis for a checklist of what to do and what not to do to get the most out of any notebook's battery charge.
Use Of WLAN, LAN, And PAN Components, Continued
To keep the cards and their communications channels constantly active, we custom-built a small program that copied a 1.2 MB compressed file from the notebook to a dedicated server in an endless loop. Because the file fits entirely into RAM, our measurements include no distortions introduced from additional disk access. As usual, we wrote an entry to a file every ten seconds and kept that activity up until the battery ran dry and the notebook shut itself down.
Our home-brew "Network Analyzer" created constant network traffic
Discussion
Compared to simple office use (2h 43min) intensive WLAN activity reduces battery lifetime up to 36% (the Gigabyte PC Card had the biggest effect overall). The internal mini-PCI modules had less impact. For example, tests with the Broadcom unit showed a 20% loss in battery life (about 34 minutes). It was especially noteworthy to observe that Intel's "Centrino Module" reduced battery lifetime even more than the competitor's product.
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