[Ti] Battery Life

[Dennis Fazio]

--On Friday, December 20, 2002 10:43 PM +0100 Daniel Borge 
<dani at borgepalace.com> wrote:

> Just was wondering what's the battery life when u guys watch a DVD film
> without being connected?

I used to  get pretty close to a full two hour movie on one battery. That 
included driving external speakers. Now that my batteries have aged about a 
year, I doubt that's attainable any more.

But, you have to admit, being able to do 90 minutes running a movie, where 
the hard drive is spinning, the DVD drive is churning, the audio amp is 
driving and the CPU is crunching like a banshee is damn good.

Battery life is too unpredictable because of varying power drains. All the 
vendors can't be blamed for putting laboratory "guaranteed not to exceed" 
peak numbers on all their performance specs such as CPU MIPS or megaflops 
or megabits/sec or battery run time. They've all been doing it for decades 
and it should be looked at as "marketing facts" which are sort of like 
using Hollywood movies to learn history.

Even with an aged battery, by setting screen and disk shutdown times to a 
minute or so, I used to be able to run nearly an entire day (~ 6 hours) at 
seminars or symposiums (on OS 9) and take many pages of notes on a single 
battery with  my PB 140 and 540, thus saving the race for the seats near 
the power outlets. It's all how you use it and manage your watts.
--
Dennis Fazio
dfz at mac.com