Sony Switching Battery Life Scoring Method, No Longer Advertising Wildly Misleading Numbers

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Sick and tired of never getting even close to the 10 to 12 hours of battery life advertised by PC companies on your laptop? Sony hears you, and is taking pains to improve at least one thing about their power packs. No, not the overheating factor, though they say they've got that somewhat under control now, honest! The company recently told PC Authority that they would be switching to a more realistic measurement for advertising their notebook battery figures. Yay? Notebook vendors usually base their battery numbers off of Japanese tech association Jeita's method, which measures power depletion when the laptop's completely idle and then averages that number with the laptop's life when running a movie file. Sony will be switching to a Jeita "A" standard, which uses only the movie file test's results. Good news for the hapless consumer, I guess, but I'm pretty sure everyone was hoping for something more like "Hey, your battery will in fact last 11 hours and it won't explode on you either!" [PC Authority]