WinBook J4 Pentium 4 2.4GHz

Performance - MobileMark 2002

This review marks the first use of a new standard in battery life benchmarks. Today we turn to BAPCo's MobileMark 2002 to provide us with the battery life and performance information that is so crucial for notebook users. In the past we had been using Ziff Davis Media's BatteryMark 2001 to report our system battery life. We were often times frustrated by BatteryMark 2001 due to its incompatibility with Windows XP and its somewhat aged benchmark engine. The Windows XP incompatibility turned out to be a big problem for BatteryMark, as Mobile Pentium 4-M processors would not properly SpeedStep in Windows 2000. Nonetheless, our hands were tied. We had to use BatteryMark 2001 because despite all the flaws it was still the best measure of battery life out there. Until now.

MobileMark 2002 features an enhanced workload that consists of today's most popular application. The benchmark uses a total of 9 programs (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, and Macromedia Flash 5) to create a realistic user scenario with pauses and all. Not only does MobileMark 2002 measure battery life of a system in minutes until the battery is completely drained, it also outputs a performance number for the system while running on battery. Depending on the processor and power saving technology used by a system, performance of a laptop can go down when running on battery life. MobileMark 2002 takes this into account and gives a performance score for each system.

Since we just switched to MobileMark 2002 we are unable to include any other notebooks in the graphs for comparison. From here on out we will be switching to MobileMark 2002 so look for future reviews to include more notebooks in the graphs.

Battery Performance MobileMark 2002 WinBook J4 2.4GHz 119 | 0 | 24 | 48 | 71 | 95 | 119 | 143

First we take a look at the MobileMark 2002 performance rating of our WinBook J4 2.4GHz. The score is based off of the average response time for the system being tested and is compared to that of a fixed platform used by BAPCo when creating the benchmark. This platform received a score of 100. Since we have not used MobileMark 2002 on any other notebooks we can not be sure how the WinBook J4 2.4GHz performs in comparison to the other systems but since the notebook's processor speed does change when on battery power, the system should be equally as fast regardless of power state.

Battery Life (minutes) MobileMark 2002 WinBook J4 2.4GHz (no 802.11b) WinBook J4 2.4GHz (802.11b) 170 156 | 0 | 34 | 68 | 102 | 136 | 170 | 204

Again, we are unable to compare the WinBook J4 2.4GHz to any other notebook systems since we just switched to MobileMark 2002. We are hesitant to compare our MobileMark 2002 battery life scores to the battery life scores recorded by BatteryMark 2001 since not only are the two run under different operating systems but they use different workloads. What we were able to do is compare the WinBook J4 to itself.

We were curious to see what kind of battery life hit occurred with the 802.11b wireless card enabled. We suspected that enabling wireless connectivity would decrease our battery life but we were not sure how much. In order to make sure that the wireless was fully disabled during our tests we actually pulled the mini-PCI card out of the system.

The WinBook J4 2.4GHz had a fairly impressive battery life of 2 hours 50 minutes with the wireless card out of the system. When the 802.11b card was reinserted into the J4 and enabled battery life decreased by 14 minutes to 2 hours and 36 minutes. With the J4's large battery and power hungry components enabling 802.11b did not affect battery life too adversely. In fact the use of wireless only decreased battery life by about 8%.

This shows that that the 802.11b solution on the WinBook J4 2.4GHz is not power hungry enough to make a very large difference in battery life thanks to the unit's large battery.