It’s a common problem. You get your laptop or Netbook home expecting to get so many hours of battery life out of it, after all that is what was advertised, and lo and behold you find you get half or even less than half of what you expected. What’s wrong?
The problem is the industry benchmark for testing laptop battery lives. The MobileMark benchmark was created by the Business Applications Performance Corp or BAPCo for short, a consortium of members which include the likes of Intel, Dell, HP, AMD as well as others.
“Everyone in the industry knows this benchmark is wildly optimistic and that the actual battery life you’ll get is often less than half what MobileMark suggests,” wrote industry analyst Rob Enderle recently.
“This is because MobileMark measures battery life much like you might measure gas mileage if you started the car, put it in neutral, and coasted down a long hill.”
It might help if we explain just how the MobileMark goes about testing a battery on a laptop or Netbook.
BAPCo identified three distinct usage types and therefore a device is tested under three different scenarios.
- The productivity module tests battery life whilst performing “common office activities including document management, data processing, file management and rich content creation”.
- The DVD module evaluates battery life whilst “playing back a movie” which is actually a 3D animated short, Elephants Dream.
- The Reader module contains a light-activity workload modelling a user reading through a document. The compressed, content-protected document is read at a pace of one page per two minutes.
It is assumed that most people use their Netbook or Laptop as described in the first scenario, which just isn’t always the case.
Another problem with this is that the test is based on standard software and doesn’t account for people playing music or video applications or browsing the web when that is what most of us do is it not.
The final point is that the test actually assumes that Wi-Fi is turned off. What is that about? Netbooks are designed specifically for quick access on the move so it makes no sense whatsoever to base the anticipated battery life on something else?
The time has come for an updated test that takes account of how users actually use the devices that are being tested.
Yes, the laptop battery benchmark test is well out of date.
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i totally agree, even my Laptop doesn’t give me a back up for more that two hours while performing simple works and when i browse internet n specially open a number to tabs together it just give me a little more that an hour back up.And i usually access Internet from WiFi and i have been looking for the solution for the quite long time.