I’ve been testing notebook computers now for the last 14 years and I cannot remember one occasion where the battery life actually lived up to the claims of its vendor.

When I developed PC User’s UserBench Battery 2008 benchmark in 2007, which was the first battery benchmark designed in Australia, I wanted to develop a test that would give real-world results. So in that benchmark, there is a video clip that plays endlessly in a loop while the battery is running down.

Sure, it might seem like a tough test – afterall, video playback and encoding requires far more horsepower than if you’re just sitting looking at a word processing and (relatively) occasionally hitting some keys.

However, if you’re on a long-haul flight from New York to London and you hate the on-board “entertainment”, your notebook is going to become your instant best-friend and more likely than not, you’re going to watch a movie or something like that. So a benchmark that tests battery life playing video is pretty “real-world”.

Now we’ve been using this benchmark now for the last 18 months or so and the best battery life we’ve seen is typically around the four-hour mark and that’s on a netbook, which typically combines a low-power processor with a decent six-cell battery.

Most Core 2 Duo-based notebooks these days are struggling to reach three-hours with two-and-a-half hours the more likely return.

But with more and more notebooks claiming what seems like incredible battery life of up to seven, eight or nine hours, how come we never see it?

Part of the problem is that there is no definitive way to test battery life. Do you test it in hibernation mode, power management set to “max battery” or “always on”? Maximum or minimum screen brightness? All of these factors and others contribute to battery life and anyone of them can significantly change the end result.

In practise, any time I see a vendor’s notebook battery life claim, I automatically halve it before I start and that gives me a “ball-park” figure to expect when actually running real-world application battery testing.

There may well be some certain modes and circumstances where the notebook vendor’s actual battery life claims can be achieved.

It’s just that I’ve never seen it.

Similar Posts:

 

Social Media buttons brought to you by S-ButtonZ (WordPress Plugin)