How to make a right choice of a laptop? A laptop is a personal computer designed for mobile use. Accordingly, it should be light, small and has a long battery life. Well, it must have a sufficient performance level to perform a set of tasks. Oh yes, there is a design. But it is impossible to measure it objectively. As regards the size and weight are clearly defined, because the manufacturers exactly indicate these parameters, but not everything is clear with a performance and a battery life.
Typical a battery life for standard laptops is from two to five hours of light-duty use, but may drop to as little as one hour when doing power-intensive tasks. New innovations in laptops and batteries have been seen as new capabilities in power saving which can provide up to a full 24 hours of continued operation, assuming average power consumption levels. Obviously, it is profitable to show as much as possible long battery life for the manufacturers. It is equally obvious that only under ideal conditions we can get a maximum operating time. For example, you listen to music through headphones when the screen is off, or read the text with lower screen brightness when all unused interfaces are disabled (such as Wi-Fi).
How can you know the battery life of your laptop? The very first thing that comes to mind is just to power it on and work/fun, until a battery will not dead. Not a long time ago, it was an excellent variant - almost every laptop could run at least 3 hours in video playback (it is only two films). But now it is possible to meet power-efficient laptops that can provide up to 12 hours of battery life. Even a very patient man would be tired of waiting.
It is most convenient to carry out check process at night or when a laptop is not needed. I offer such plan – we choose four typical, completely different in required performance tasks: reading books, Internet, watching video, 3D games.
The program has auto scrolling that allows you to simply click "Enable scrolling" and read without flipping through pages. And both hands are always free. So you can read more and control scroll speed depending on speed reading. At the same time you can improve your reading technique.
Try it; perhaps you have been looking for it so long.
Of course, you can use any browser. I will use Firefox in the example and av-school.ru.
There is nothing unusual, except that work with a small width of the screen is unavailable for av-school.ru.
I prefer using the VLC media player to view a video. For the experiment you can use any player that can play videos in a loop or play a list for a couple of dozen hours of video playback.
It is possible to set never-ending repetition using Tools-Preferences menu. Then select "All" and choose the right option in the settings of Playlist.
I used the trailer for the film "Alice in Wonderland" as the video.
Well, you can use 3DMark to determine the performance of a computer's 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. It is the popular benchmarking tool created by Futuremark Corporation. In my case it is 3DMark 03.
But you can choose any version of the very popular 3DMark series following the link http://www.futuremark.com/download/. This test is convenient because it gives the possibility to start in an eternal cycle.
Time will be noted by simple bat-file and sleep tool. The tool is available in Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.
Toolkit can be installed, but you can just extract sleep.exe using some archiver:
In order to note the time, we will write the current time in a file, sleep for 5 minutes, and repeat it. Thus, when a battery is discharged a laptop will be powered off, the last write in the file will show time of a laptop work. At this time an owner of laptop can sleep or be engaged in one's affairs.
Bat-file looks like this:
What do these strings mean?
– to display the current time
– write it to file. The path and file name of course can be changed at yours discretion.
– to sleep for 300 seconds (5 minutes). Accuracy can also be set at discretion.
– is an infinite loop.
We have performed easy all experiments. E-book reader can scroll until the text is not finished, so we need to find a thicker book or set scroll speed slower, so that the book has not ended; player plays videos, while a laptop’s battery will not be discharged; 3DMark tests nice demos, web browser ... And what does browser? It can only display the same page as stupid. It makes no sense, because Wi-Fi is also able to fall into a hibernation and do not consume energy.
I will have to think about what can be considered a normal internet surfing, but so that it was not difficult to simulate? It is preferably not to use complicated tools, like AutoIt.
After thinking a bit I decided that we will simply open the page with an interval of the same 5 minutes. Upgraded script will look like this:
What do these strings mean?
– repeat 10 times
and – the same as in previous example
– start Firefox and open the page av-school.ru
– close browser.
It works in a such way. At first Firefox is started on av-school.ru. When you call it next time, a new tab is opened. It is repeated ten times. Browser is closed in order not to accumulate a million open tabs; it may lead to use a lot of RAM after the tenth times (it will pass 50 minutes). Then everything is repeated again and again until the battery will not be discharged.
It should be noted that when you reload the same site again, Firefox loads it from the Internet, doesn’t get it from cache. Of course, it would be good to add a slow scrolling to the bottom of the opening page, but how to do it I do not know.
In such way the task of laptop’s battery life calculation can be applied.
Laptop’s battery
