How much of a power drain is a bluetooth dongle?

[mshan]

Just wondering how much of a hit I would take on battery life of my Dell Mini 9 if I added one of those usb bluetooth dongles to the netbook?

Bluetooth would potentially be for bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and possibly bluetooth headset.

 

[corkyg]

Bluetooth is not power friendly. It is an RF transmitter, and thus consumes power. Not really a good choice for peripherals. I would only use it when on A/C.

 

[mshan]

RF notebook mouse would have same power consumption?

And are we talking about knocking say an hour or more off of battery life? (Mini 9 seems to have at least 3 - 4 hours of battery life with wi-fi enabled).

 

[zerogear]

Hmm. Not sure about actual power consumption. But on my MSI Wind, I usually have 4hr 53 min with wifi on, if I switch bluetooth, it drops down (estimate) to 3 hr 10 minutes or so. So its pretty significant.

 

[heymrdj]

It's not that significant. Turning the bluetooth on inside my HP9550t laptop only hurt my battery life by 11 miles using my bluetooth DiNovo.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: heymrdj
It's not that significant. Turning the bluetooth on inside my HP9550t laptop only hurt my battery life by 11 miles using my bluetooth DiNovo.

 

[ajaidevsingh]

Very odd comments??


Bluetooth never ever consumes more power than wifi, you can expect more miles :-> from you lappy if bluetooth is ON and Wifi is OFF rather in vice verse....

 

[Pliablemoose]

Originally posted by: heymrdj
It's not that significant. Turning the bluetooth on inside my HP9550t laptop only hurt my battery life by 11 miles using my bluetooth DiNovo.

I get better mpg with my notebook when I use premium electricity, anyone else notice the difference?

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Pliablemoose

Originally posted by: heymrdj
It's not that significant. Turning the bluetooth on inside my HP9550t laptop only hurt my battery life by 11 miles using my bluetooth DiNovo.

I get better mpg with my notebook when I use premium electricity, anyone else notice the difference?

I know I sure do. I even got a used power conditioner for my laptop and desktop. I can definitely see the difference on those long frag trips. I am also thinking about switching to High Life oil for my hard drives, what do you think?