Posts Tagged notebooks
It’s Time For a New MobileMark
Posted by jasoncross in Media, PC Tech on October 6, 2009
Battery life ratings on laptops are a lie. Okay, that’s melodramatic: they’re not a lie, they’re just not telling you the truth you think they are. You read some review or look at some spec sheet or label on the shelf in a store and it says “5 hours battery life” and you think you’re going to be able to use your notebook for 5 hours. Then the battery dies in 2 1/2 hours or less. In fact, that “half of what they claim” rule of thumb turns out to be a pretty good one.
As they point out in a pretty neat article about the issue at Icrontic, the problem is that the industry standard for measuring battery life is a program called MobileMark 2007. This program basically runs your computer through some productivity apps, which are pretty easily cached into RAM on modern notebooks so you don’t get much hard disk usage. These run until the battery dies, and that’s your battery life benchmark. Wi-Fi is almost always disabled, the laptop is almost always in its most power-saving and low performance profile, screen brightness is usually at 50% or less, etc.
Samsung NP-Q320 Review at PC World
Posted by jasoncross in PC Tech, Work on September 17, 2009
My latest laptop review is up now at PC World, for the Samsung NP-Q320. It’s a pretty good notebook for the price. At just under $1,000, I think it hits the sweet spot for price/performance for a lot of folks. Those $600 notebooks just have too many compromises, I think. At that point you might as well go for something really small and light in the $400 range. I generally prefer a notebook that is small and light enough not to be a burden to carry around (no 17″ models for me…I’m just not the market for that), and for me a really good notebook has got to have discrete graphics. Even if it’s just the extremely low-end GeForce G 105M, as in this Samsung, it’s still way better than integrated graphics.
Of course, if I were buying a notebook for myself, I’d probably wait until the middle of October and get one of those really awesome new HP Envy notebooks. They’re a lot more expensive, but oh-so-awesome. (Probably. Who knows what “gotchas” they haven’t told us about yet.)