Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

How long is long enough for laptop battery life?

battery life

What kind of battery life do you demand from your laptop? Would you be fine with a few hours, or do you want a full workday out of one charge, or perhaps even more? This is a question facing many of us, and recently we at Pingdom spent some time thinking about it.

To start off with, isn’t it amazing how much of our daily lives today depend on battery-operated devices? Smartphones, cameras, laptops, razors, etc. After we had attended the Velocity conference in London recently, we said that we would find a solution that would let us be online all day long without having to recharge, so what was our solution? An iPad you say? Not quite.

Does longer battery life mean better productivity?

If you want to be productive with your laptop while on the go, you don’t want to have to constantly worry about whether you’re close to a power outlet or not. So ideally, you want your gear to be like the Energizer Bunny and just keep on going, so you can write your code, edit your photos, or whatever else you might be doing.

There are of course many portable computers that offer good battery life. Apple says that its 13-inch MacBook Air should get 7 hours on one charge, and there are some PC laptops capable of producing 10 hours or more of battery life.

But we became very interested in finding something that would run just as long as possible without a portable nuclear reactor attached.

After some research we ordered a Lenovo X230, a 12.5-inch Windows laptop, with an Intel Core i7 processor and SSD storage. With the included 9-cell battery we get somewhere in the region of 8-9 hours of battery life out of it when we’re careful with the settings, which is not bad.

laptop battery life

Slice battery

But where it gets really interesting is when we attach the optional slice battery. It’s called slice, presumably, because the battery covers the bottom of the X230, and makes the computer just over two centimeters thicker, and heavier too, of course.

With the slice battery, Lenovo says that we should be getting 24 hours of battery life, something that we can pretty much verify now.

Imagine that.

After a 14-hour day at Internet Days here in Sweden, where most of that time was spent online, Tweeting, Facebooking, chatting, writing, editing and uploading photos and more, the X230 still showed about 5 hours left on the battery. That was just after we had spent a solid hour at the end of the day, finishing up a blog post and uploading a few hundred photos (over a 3G connection, we might add).

And we think we could squeeze out more, by keeping the display on lower brightness (which is hard when you’re editing photos), and perhaps another few tweaks.

A few downsides

Of course not all is positive though. With the slice battery attached, the X230 is no longer a very slim and light computer. There is no doubt than an iPad, even when combined with an external keyboard, would be smaller and lighter, but it would have less than half of the battery life.

So it might be that a Lenovo is not as sexy as a MacBook Air. (What are we saying? Of course it’s not!) It’s more like a tank in the form of a laptop, with a red thing sticking out of the keyboard. It’s also bigger and heavier than Apple’s tablet, and there’s none of that sleek touch-goodness.

But if we can get that much battery life out of it, we’re more than happy to put up with the design.

What’s your experience?

There’s no doubt that a laptop is a series of compromises in design, functionality, battery life, performance, etc. In this article we focused on just one factor, the battery life.

What’s more important to you? Perhaps you accept shorter battery life if you get a faster processor or a bigger display, or perhaps thin and light is what’s most important to you.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free