[chart] Toshiba laptop battery usage
I don’t trust laptop batteries. They say, “3:25 remaining” and then twenty minutes later they’re giving you a low battery warning. With all of the amazing technology crammed into my device, how are we not able to better predict battery life?
The other day I did a little experiment. During a four and a half hour span I periodically recorded what my laptop claimed to be the remaining battery life. I then graphed these values against the actual passage of time. In a perfect world my remaining battery life would drain by one hour per real-world hour - make sense?
I created a linear trendline (with the equation shown on the graph) to generalize the results. Notice the equation has the slope term -1.2229x, which means that for every real hour that passed my battery life went down by about 1.3 hours. Ah hah!
During this time I had a couple browser windows open and was doing some writing in Microsoft Word. I was also listening to streaming music from grooveshark. Maybe the “estimated remaining battery life” is only accurate if the laptop isn’t being used?
Regardless, the laptop battery continually gets my hopes up and then under delivers. Until now I thought it was my imagination. I’m on to your little game, battery!
