Notebook battery review

Dell 4 cells 2200mAh inspiron Mini 9 battery test

Last night I ran a quick test on how long my new Dell Inspiron Mini 9’s battery would last under “normal netbook workload”.

This is the Dell inspiron Mini 9 battery Detail info:

14.8V 4Cells 32.4WAh Li-ion battery (As HP Pavilion DV4 battery, Pavilion DV5 battery, Pavilion DV7 battery, Pavilion DV3000 battery)

Dell inspiron Mini 9 batetry Test Details:

• OS: Gentoo Linux (what else? )
• Running programs: KDE 4, Konqueror, Thunderbird (fetching mail via IMAPS every 5 minutes)
• Conditions:
• Wireless connection to Internet, shell script kills and reloads Konqueror with three websites every two minutes (emulating a user who browses the WWW).
• Display set to lowest brightness level, screensaver / standby / etc. deactivated so that it was switched on all the time.

Dell inspiron Mini 9 batetry Test Data capturing:

The ‘remaining capacity’ value from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state and a timestamp were written to a file every minute:

#!/bin/bash  LOG="/home/pn/batterylog"  echo "Battery log, started $(date)" >$LOG  while ((1))  
do    TIME=$(date "+%s")    REMAINING=$(grep "remaining capacity" /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state | cut -b 26- | cut -d' ' -f1)  
  echo "$TIME $REMAINING" >> $LOG    sync    sleep 60  done

Dell inspiron Mini 9 batetry Test Results:

The Inspiron Mini 9 battery lasted a little longer than 4 hours and 50 minutes which means approx. 6.7 watts average power consumption while browsing the web over WLAN.
This time I decided to use OpenOffice Calc to create the graph -

The test from: Patrick Blog