How We Test Notebooks

LAPTOP Battery Test

This test, developed in the LAPTOP labs, replicates continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi until the battery is completely drained. Starting with a full battery, a notebook runs a script that visits 60 popular Web sites in a loop, pausing 33 seconds on each, then closing and reopening the Firefox browser with the next page. The test is run in Power Saver battery mode, with the screen at 40 percent brightness, and the notebook’s settings are tweaked to prevent it from entering standby mode or going into hibernation.

LAPTOP Transfer Test

This benchmarking test was developed inside the LAPTOP labs. During this test, a 4.97GB folder of mixed media files, including photos, documents, videos, and music files, is copied from one folder on the notebook’s hard drive to another. We record the speed with which the notebook records the file. The average file-transfer score for a mainstream notebook is 17.8 MBps.

Boot Time

Using a stopwatch, we record the amount of time the notebook takes to boot from being completely shut down to the moment we have control of the desktop and all of the system tray items are loaded. The average boot time for a mainstream notebook (Windows) is about one minute.

Wireless Performance

Using Netperf, a benchmark suite that measures network performance, we test the throughput of a notebook’s internal Wi-Fi card at 15 and 50 feet from our test router. On average, a mainstream notebook scores 18.4 Mbps from 15 feet, and 15.7 Mbps from 50 feet.