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Hardware &Wireless Isaac on 07 Apr 2007 12:18 pm

How Wireless Affects Battery Life

From TabletPCReview.com, Tablet PC Battery Life: How Wireless Affects Power Consumption

For those that saw a couple of formulas and graphs and skipped ahead to this part, I don’t blame you, here are the take aways based on the data:

  • Simply turning on the wireless card doesn’t drain much power, it might shorten battery life by 2%, so if you want to remain connected to download email it’s no big deal.
  • If you turn on wireless and are constantly trying to acquire a connection, such as if you’re constantly dropping a connection and then trying to reconnect, your battery life could be 6% – 7% shorter than usual due to the wireless card having to work extra hard.
  • If you have wireless card on and are transferring lots of data, such as downloading large files or constantly browsing the web, battery life could be about 6% shorter than simply no wireless on. Consider downloading large files later when you’re plugged in.
  • If you don’t need to use the web, turn wireless off, it’ll save you at least a few short (but maybe precious) minutes of battery life!

In my in-class use of my tablet I have generally just left the wireless on, in case I decided I wanted to hit the web or grab something from the server, unless I was having connection issues, in which case I’d turn it off mostly to avoid the annoying continual popups telling me about the connection issues while I’m busy trying to teach.

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2 Responses to “How Wireless Affects Battery Life”

  1. on 08 Apr 2007 at 4:40 am 1.tech said …

    but, i can change according to battery model, i thik,

  2. on 08 Apr 2007 at 12:39 pm 2.Isaac said …

    the type of battery and the total capacity may have some effect, but the results given were more based on the power draw of the wireless card during various activities. you might want to read the full post that I referenced.