Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Does the Amount of RAM Have an Impact on Laptop Battery Life in Sleep Mode?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 12:08 PM
To test whether the amount of RAM has an impact on battery life while in sleep mode, I devised a simple test: I took my XPS M1330 with 4 GB of Kingston RAM, charged up the battery to 100%, then put it into sleep mode for 12 hours. I disabled the function where Vista will go into hibernate mode after "x" hours of being in sleep mode. While seemingly a good feature, on the XPS M1330 it would wake up the laptop (lights blazing) which results in the slot-load DVD drive making a "cha-chunk" sound. Having this happen in the middle of the night when the laptop is on a nightstand right next to your head is disturbing to say the least.
At the end of the 12 hours, I opened the lid on the laptop, waited about 20 seconds for the system to stabilize, and took a battery reading. The results? With 4 GB of RAM installed (2 x 2 GB sticks), and with the 9-cell M1330 battery, after 12 hours the battery level had dropped from 100% down to 91%. With 1 GB of RAM installed (1 x 1 GB stick) after 12 hours the battery level had dropped to 92%. Because this test required me to not use the notebook for 12 hours, I only did each test once.
My conclusion? The 1% variance is within the margin of error, so I believe that having 4 GB of RAM poses no significant added loss of battery life in sleep mode over having 1 GB of RAM. I might have seen a more noticeable difference if I had conducted this test over a 72 hour period, but I don't have a spare XPS M1330 sitting around.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's mostly impressed with the XPS M1330.