Testbed and Methods

We tested the Toshiba Portege M100 with the preinstalled Microsoft Windows XP Professional OS. Before our tests we disabled energy-saving and networking services, turned off the audio subsystem and the screen-saver.

This notebook comes with the energy consumption settings set up for the maximum performance. In this mode, the notebook doesn’t change the frequency of its functional components when feeding on the battery, which inevitably reduces its battery life. Sometimes, however, you may want your notebook to work long, although with lower performance. In this case, you have two ways of adjusting the power consumption settings:

1. Use the special applications from Toshiba: Power Saver and Hardware Setup. Select the Setting CPU Speed tab in Toshiba’s Hardware Setup and choose one of the CPU modes (only with processors that support Intel’s SpeedStep technology):
• Dynamically Switchable (the processor automatically changes its clock rate depending on the power source – accumulator or wall outlet);
• Always High (the CPU performance is the highest irrespective of the power source);
• Always Low (the CPU performance is the lowest irrespective of the power source).

Then you select a desired setting in Toshiba Power Saver that controls power-saving modes (and offers you the option of creating your own power profiles).

2. You can adjust BIOS settings. To enter the BIOS Setup program, hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Esc keys when turning the computer on and then hit the F1 key.

Thus, we have two test modes: with the highest CPU performance (and the shortest battery-life time) and with the lowest CPU performance (and the longest battery-life time). We chose the CPU mode in the BIOS: High and Low settings.

We used the following benchmarking software: tests for checking the system performance in multimedia and office applications (Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), synthetic tests (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004), gaming tests (3DMark 2001SE Pro), and battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.2b).

Performance

After testing the Portege M100 in synthetic tests, and in the Winstone tests, we realized that we couldn’t expect high performance from it. The manufacturer focused mostly on the long time of autonomous work, rather than on breaking any performance records.

These are the numbers we got in the tests:

When the Portege M100 receives power from its battery, its performance degenerates in three times (by 60-76%). This difference is due to the processor’s frequency reduction from 1.2GHz to 600MHz.