How We Tested
Winstone 99 V1.2
Business Winstone tests with the most popular office suites in the marketplace rather than individual applications: Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, Lotus SmartSuite, and Microsoft Office 97. Following the lead of real users, Ziff-Davis engineers keep multiple applications open within each suite, and switch tasks between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The new High-End Winstone 99 focuses on hot spots where demanding users tend to have to wait on their notebooks.
Winstone 99 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a notebook's overall performance when running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT (High-End Winstone runs only on NT). Winstone runs real 32-bit business suites and high-end, demanding applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a notebook takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores. Winstone's tests don't mimic what these programs do; they run actual application code. The CD-ROM that contains Winstone also contains all the files and application portions the benchmark needs to run.
WinBench 99 V1.1
WinBench 99 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures the performance of a notebooks graphics, disk, processor, and video subsystems in a Windows environment. WinBench 99's 32-bit tests can only run on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT systems. WinBench 99 features new, improved graphics tests, improved disk tests, and several all-new tests for all types of storage devices.
WinBench 99's Graphics Playback technology reproduces the graphics operations the Winstone 99 business and high-end applications perform, affording you a better-than-ever measure of your PC's graphics subsystem. WinBench 99 returns the following main results that provide an overview of a notebooks graphics, disk, and processor performance:
CD WinBench 99
CD WinBench 99 measures the performance of a CD's audio subsystem, which includes the CD drive, controller and driver, and the system processor. You will need to run this benchmark from the CD WinBench 99 CD-ROM while it's spinning in your system's CD drive.
BatteryMark 3.0
The test was performed under a worst case scenario; we disabled hibernation and suspend modes to force the notebooks to completely drain their batteries. The BatteryMark software runs a similar suite of software to the other Ziff-Davis tests while recording the battery life. We reiterate, these are all worst case scenarios, and actual battery life will be substantially greater.
7%
1%
