Battery Life and Mobile Mark 2005
You’ll be hard pressed to find a 17″ laptop with extraordinary long battery life, most 17″ units will offer anywhere between 1 hour to 2 hours under a full charge. To test the capabilities of our laptop sample we run three battery benchmarks: Battery Eater Pro, Battery Mark 4.01, and Mobile Mark 2005. Battery Eater Pro is a benchmark that loads the system using graphics, memory, and hard drive activity. Battery Mark is an older benchmark that simulates a typical office productivity by running sessions of MS Word and Excel. Mobile Mark 2005 is a bit different and deserves a seperate section below.
*Asus W5F using upgraded 6-cell battery.
*Asus W5F using upgraded 6-cell battery.
From the above results, the battery life on the M1710 is quite exceptional. For a 17″ laptop with top-end components, you get battery life that almost as long as a the Asus W5F 12″ ultra-portable that uses an extended 6-cell battery. You can expect 2 – 2.5 hours on a full charge with minimal power savings and you can certainly get longer with a more sensible power scheme.
Mobile Mark 2005
Mobile Mark 2005 is a benchmark that runs three tests while the laptop is running on batteries: office productivity (i.e. Excel, Word, Outlook); DVD playback; and Wireless activity. Each test begins with the laptop charged to 100% and is put through the test until the batter is depleted to 2% to 3%, at which point the test stops and gives a score in minutes.
Overall Mobile Mark gives you a measurement in terms of how long the battery lasts while performing a specific action, and how much of that action you can perform during that time. For each test, the brightness of the display was set to 100%.
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Mobile Mark 2005 Settings
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*Asus W5F using upgraded 6-cell battery.
*Asus W5F using upgraded 6-cell battery.
The Dell M1710 performs well in this test showing over 2 hours of battery life in productivity, DVD playback, and wireless web surfing. However, the above results show that the Asus A7J 17″ laptop scores higher in the Mobile Mark 2005 Productivity score.
Battery Health
A unique feature from Dell is a battery life and health indicator on the battery itself. By pressing the battery test button on the battery, a meter of four lights will tell you how much charge is left 4 lights meaning the battery is at or nearly full charge. I imagine this is helpful when you want to know the charge of the laptop without wasting battery power to boot into Windows to find out.
By pressing and holding the battery test button the battery will report how much charge it can hold — four lights for a battery in good condition, one to three lights if your battery is deteriorating, and zero if the battery can barely hold onto a charge. This is useful in determining if it’s time to replace the power on your M1710. The Dell QuickSet software also has a battery health and battery charge indicators.
