Testing Methods

The hard drive of the VAIO VGN-T2XRP/S was formatted in NTFS before the tests. Then I installed Microsoft Windows XP professional with DirectX 9.0c and Windows Media Encoder 9.0 with Windows Media Player 9.0. Power-saving services, the audio subsystem, network services were all disabled for the duration of the tests. The notebook was tested at the maximum brightness and resolution (1280x768) of the screen.

I set the Windows Taskbar to hide automatically and also chose the following settings: “Classic” Desktop theme, no background image, no screensaver.

Two power modes were used. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.

Our tests:

1. Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2005, PCMark 2004), office and multimedia (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2001SE Pro , Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);
2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.60).

There are three test modes in Battery Eater:

• Classical – the system bears the maximum and evenly distributed load
• Reader’s test (the pages are scrolled through each 15 seconds)
• Idle mode

In the Idle mode (when the notebook bears no load at all) I began to play a DVD movie. Generally speaking, DVD playback is one of the hardest operational modes for a notebook’s battery: high power consumption of the optical drive combines with a high brightness of the screen and a very high sound volume. And since DVDs are so popular today, we need to know how much time the notebook can last on its battery under such conditions.