Yesterday and today measured battery life under bootcamped Win 7. Machine is 2010 MBA Ultimate, Windows 64-bit.
(1) Yesterday, 10.40 p.m. - 11.30 p.m. = 50 minutes. Starting battery level 96%. Light browsing (5-10 tabs in Chrome with FlashBlock, 30% of flash content clicked-to-play), Outlook in the background. 20% brighteness. After 50 minutes, battery was at 85%.
(2) With battery at 85%, went to standby from 11.30 p.m. yesterday to 09.36 a.m. today, that is for 606 minutes. Resumed with 81% battery charge, that is 4% drain in 10 hours - seems OK given that this was neither hibernation nor hybrid sleep mode.
(3) Today, 09.36 - 12.47 = 191 minutes. 40% of time – heavy word processing (several layers of comments and changes in ‘track changes’ mode. 40% of time – heavy excel files, 10+ tabs with VBA and macros. 5% of time – Acrobat Pro, re-arranging PDFs and some OCR. 5% of time – light browsing (5 tabs in Chrome with FlashBlock). Logitech nano receiver in USB port. 75% brighteness. Machine shut down at 4% battery level.
When awake, WiFi and BT were always on. Always running in background were usual Windows 7 stuff, as well as AV (Kaspersky), ABBYY Lingvo (English-Russian-Ukrainian dictionary), Skype, Outlook, Acrobat tray, Bootcamp, IPod service, Brother network scanner/printer control panel, couple of Windows 7 gadgets.
This brings me to just above 4 hours battery life at averaged medium load. This is given that starting battery level was 96%, and that 4% drained during standby. And I would like to reflect a bit on this:
(1) Very decent battery life as compared to my Sony Vaio Z i7, which never lasts beyond 3 hours at best (even when switched to IGP).
(2) My productivity in WinOffice is 15-20% higher than in MacOffice. This is (a) because I can customize it better; (b) because Windows works with Sharepoint much faster - even though MacOffice has Document Connection, it still sucks as opposed to WinOffice sharepoint integration features; and (c) Word for Mac has serious issues in handling multiple comments/revisions/deletions in 'track changes' mode - it starts slowing down and stuttering, which increases my idle time.
(3) I do not know what is wrong with me (or with MacOS), but system/interface/menu fonts under MacOS seem blurry to me, both on internal and external displays (I have NEC full HD 23" IPS screen). Windows fonts are crisp, sharp and always very readable -- and I believe this also adds to overall efficiency, at least because eyes are less strained and I do not get tired that quickly.
(4) Under same usage scenario, I was able to get just above 5 hours under MacOS on same machine (looks like Office is battery hungry, but I`Works lacks essential features I absolutely need).
Therefore, the 1-hour difference in battery life is mostly offset my by increased productivity under bootcamped Windows 7, which 2010 MBA handles very well.
Hope this post will be useful to some of you. Sorry for crap English.
(1) Yesterday, 10.40 p.m. - 11.30 p.m. = 50 minutes. Starting battery level 96%. Light browsing (5-10 tabs in Chrome with FlashBlock, 30% of flash content clicked-to-play), Outlook in the background. 20% brighteness. After 50 minutes, battery was at 85%.
(2) With battery at 85%, went to standby from 11.30 p.m. yesterday to 09.36 a.m. today, that is for 606 minutes. Resumed with 81% battery charge, that is 4% drain in 10 hours - seems OK given that this was neither hibernation nor hybrid sleep mode.
(3) Today, 09.36 - 12.47 = 191 minutes. 40% of time – heavy word processing (several layers of comments and changes in ‘track changes’ mode. 40% of time – heavy excel files, 10+ tabs with VBA and macros. 5% of time – Acrobat Pro, re-arranging PDFs and some OCR. 5% of time – light browsing (5 tabs in Chrome with FlashBlock). Logitech nano receiver in USB port. 75% brighteness. Machine shut down at 4% battery level.
When awake, WiFi and BT were always on. Always running in background were usual Windows 7 stuff, as well as AV (Kaspersky), ABBYY Lingvo (English-Russian-Ukrainian dictionary), Skype, Outlook, Acrobat tray, Bootcamp, IPod service, Brother network scanner/printer control panel, couple of Windows 7 gadgets.
This brings me to just above 4 hours battery life at averaged medium load. This is given that starting battery level was 96%, and that 4% drained during standby. And I would like to reflect a bit on this:
(1) Very decent battery life as compared to my Sony Vaio Z i7, which never lasts beyond 3 hours at best (even when switched to IGP).
(2) My productivity in WinOffice is 15-20% higher than in MacOffice. This is (a) because I can customize it better; (b) because Windows works with Sharepoint much faster - even though MacOffice has Document Connection, it still sucks as opposed to WinOffice sharepoint integration features; and (c) Word for Mac has serious issues in handling multiple comments/revisions/deletions in 'track changes' mode - it starts slowing down and stuttering, which increases my idle time.
(3) I do not know what is wrong with me (or with MacOS), but system/interface/menu fonts under MacOS seem blurry to me, both on internal and external displays (I have NEC full HD 23" IPS screen). Windows fonts are crisp, sharp and always very readable -- and I believe this also adds to overall efficiency, at least because eyes are less strained and I do not get tired that quickly.
(4) Under same usage scenario, I was able to get just above 5 hours under MacOS on same machine (looks like Office is battery hungry, but I`Works lacks essential features I absolutely need).
Therefore, the 1-hour difference in battery life is mostly offset my by increased productivity under bootcamped Windows 7, which 2010 MBA handles very well.
Hope this post will be useful to some of you. Sorry for crap English.
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