Message text written by "Brian J Beesley"
>Doesn't seem to make much difference to either of my P100
laptops. What *does* make a difference (a big one) is whether you
leave the screen and hard disk (especially the hard disk) running.
<
In my testing of battery life on my notebook, I was comparing several
fairly similar scenarios with the only difference I am sure of being
prime95
running or stopped.
For about 3 hours (each Saturday my older kid has a music rehearsal
which sets the time frame), I would work away at word documents or database
code or queries of a number of other tasks which would keep the screen
going
and use the hard drive often enough to keep it turned on.
My battery is the newer style without the memory effect. It is the base
battery
for the model notebook and is often good for 10 to 11 hours of working. I
found I
apparently needed to remove the PCMCIA cards when the unit is unplugged as
well as toggle a couple of BIOS settings for "Wake on..."
>The problem with my system is that the battery is NiMH, this has a
"memory effect", if it's in use on mains continuously then it seems
to run down quickly, whereas just after full discharge/recharge the
battery life is much longer.<
This was a concern I had for my batteries. In my case, once the charging
is at 100%,
charging stops and the battery is not further charged. According to the
manufacturer's (Micron)
tech support, leaving the unit plugged in or not should have no effect on
battery life (either in
the number of charges over its life or in the time to discharge).
I will be doing more testing but...
My P133 notebook had very little power awareness or control. This P-II
Micron GoBook2
uses many of the more recent features. I found that I really could get the
promised 10 or
11 hours of runtime use (I turned it off during idle times) from the base
battery
...I was only hoping for about half of this which would
still be a significant multiple of my old P133's battery life.
Then I noticed that the battery was running down in 2 to 3 hours, so I
tried to isolate the causes.
I found several things (noted above) before checking Prime95. Again, your
comments make me
want to recheck my conclusions but there are a number of differences among
the families of
Pentium and Pentium-II mobile processors. It may well be that each
notebook will need a test
to see if running/not running prime95 has a significant impact on battery
life.
One of the problems with a test is that older rechargeable batteries (with
memory effect) were often only
good for about 100 full charges. The newer batteries are supposedly good
for 375 (or so) full charges.
This means that a "test" carries a real cost to the life of the unit. By
comparison, the chips are expected
to last for 5 to 7 years (AMD, I think) up to 15 years (older Intel, not so
sure of the P-II, Celeron) so tests
that take a few days are not a very significant fraction of the life of the
CPU.
Joth
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
