A Guide to Improving Benchmarking for Battery Life of Notebook PCs: Measuring Battery Life for Today's Notebook PCs

Today, notebook PC customers are frequently presented with a single battery life benchmarking score that is gathered using light workloads and a relatively idle CPU. This single score does not take into account how a notebook PC battery may perform when the battery is used in a more "Active" state, such as when a notebook PC is running sophisticated graphics or performing complex computations. There is currently no single benchmark test available for notebook battery life that accurately reflects real-life usage patterns. Adding data gathered using a heavier workload and an active CPU to the currently used benchmark score can provide a more realistic gauge of battery life in notebook PCs - and this additional data is easily provided by existing mainstream benchmarking tests.