SMC recently came out with a higher power Wireless PC Card, it draws 200mW
power output, much more then the normal 30mW most cards do. Can anyone give
me an idea of what type of drain this would do to a laptop. If a normal
charge was 4 hours with a standard card, what type of length would be lost
by using a 200mW card (10 min, 30min, 1 hr, 2 hr ???)

"Al Franz" <albert@nospam.netmation.com> wrote in message news:<4fGQb.113571$5V2.563547@attbi_s53>...
Read: "...what type of impact it would have on laptop battery life."


This is contingent upon how much power your laptop draws right now.
The middle 90% range of laptop power draw is, I would guess, about
10 watts to 30 watts. So, if your laptop was at the bottom of this
mid-90% power-draw range, you would suffer a 1.7% increase in power
draw and a commensurate 1.7% decrease in battery life. Those
figures would need to be divided by three if your laptop was at
the top (i.e., 30 watts) of my guestimated 90% mid-range for power
draw. (I.e., just like in a big V-8-powered car vs. a little
four-cylinder Honda, the more your laptop draws right now, the less
of a hit you will feel when you add accessories and dead-weight.)

However, those 30mW and 200mW figures you provided sound very low
for wireless-transmitter power draw. Are you sure those aren't
figures for the transmitter _output power_? If they are, then the
power draw may be something much larger -- like 1 watt for the
low-power transmitter and 2 or 3 watts for the high-power
transmitter.

PRWEB confirms it is transmit power, and not the power consumption
of the device:

-
up to 200 milliWatts (mW) of transmit power, nearly four times the
power of standard PC Cards
-
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/3/prweb61110.php


-Chris

Chris Allen <callen@efn.org> wrote:
The PCMCIA standard limits the cards to at most around 2.5W.
For the very lowest power laptops, this may knock a fifth or so
off battery life.
For higher power ones, much less.

You are correct that was output power I quoted. The specific card I was
looking at was the SMC SMC2532W-B 2.4GHz 802.11b High Power Wireless PC
Card, reviewed at the following link....
http://reviews.cnet.com/4505-3251_7-...ml?legacy=cnet

The article states "The card's increased range lies in its 200mW power
output, a substantial increase over the 30mW offered by standard cards.
However, because the SMC card outputs more power, it also draws more power
from your notebook". Which brought about my orginal question as to how much
extra battery life would be lost from going to this type of card?



"Chris Allen" <callen@efn.org> wrote in message
news:698c89aa.0401250400.7de28578@posting.google.c om...

"Al Franz" <albert@nospam.netmation.com> wrote in message
news:SJYQb.117988$sv6.637243@attbi_s52...
t
<Snip>

I have an IBM T20 and I usually get about 1 1/2 to 2 hours
of battery life depending on what I'm doing - on a cross
country (US) flight I go through 2 batteries. I usually have
everything running full power except the CPU speed step
which slows the P III down by about 25% on batteries.

I have a Linksys WPC11 v. 4 wireless PC Card NIC. I usually
remove it unless I'm going to use it. When it's in the T20,
it cuts down my battery life by about 1/3.
--
Chas. verktyg@aol.spamski.com (Drop spamski to E-mail
me)