Battery life of dv5000

[wipeout]

On a somewhat related note, when comparing battery life between notebooks from different manufacturers it is important to note the voltage rating of the battery and not just the amps/milliamps per hour, or the amount of cells.

HP notebooks seem to come equipped with a battery that is rated at 10.8 Volts, however other manufacturers like IBM use a battery that is rated at 14.4 Volts which would translate into a greater watts/per hour (substantially longer batter life) if the amps rating of both batteries are the same.

I second that, very good point !

[wipeout]

Hi All,
Is there some standardized test format that is used to establish battery life? The reason I ask is that when playing Doom3 I get about 1.5 - 2 hours run time on a charge. Yet by the same token if I shut down the wireless, use a cat 5, and don't mess with the DVD burner I get 2.5 - 3 hours. This is a significant difference and yet the battery and the machine are both functioning correctly. So throwing out numbers on battery life without a standardized set of parameters is pretty much useless for more than a rough estimate of run time per charge.

Did you know that cat 5 (1000mbps) sucked up more power than wireless 802.11b ?

Somebody did the test with various component, they enabled/disabled every possible device on a laptop, and measured battery life. Then they somehow estimated power consumption of these devices. The conclusion was that their gigabit ethernet was consuming more power than the internal wireless card.

Interesting

[preachp]

Hi Wipeout,
That reinforces what I said. If there is no standard way of determining battery life then all the numbers are good for is rough guesstamate of what a user can expect. There should be a standard test suite for battery life say idle after 30 mins of Doom 3, 15 minutes of DVD run time, with wireless connection on at all times and screen brightness set to 80%, for example.

[wipeout]

Hi Wipeout,
That reinforces what I said. If there is no standard way of determining battery life then all the numbers are good for is rough guesstamate of what a user can expect. There should be a standard test suite for battery life say idle after 30 mins of Doom 3, 15 minutes of DVD run time, with wireless connection on at all times and screen brightness set to 80%, for example.

I like this way for measuring battery life:

Let brightness on maximum, wireless enabled. I let the laptop idle in windows, by taking attention to not let power saving features kick in.

It lets shine the processor's power saving features.

It's not really reflecting real-life usage, but it's close to. At least it's easy to reproduce ..

[preachp]

Hi Wipeout I agreee. The idea is not to imitate real life, though that would be nice, but develope a standard that would give a fair representation of the battery life using the standard. There bench mark test for just about everything else, I don't see why the same isn't done for something so important as the battery life on a laptop.