Laptop power consumption with BT/RF mouse

Hello,

I'm wondering which type of mouse is preferable from laptop's power consumption perspective - RF with USB receiver or BT? I currently have laptop's bluetoooh adapter switched of, because I do not use any BT device. Is anybody know whether using built in bluetooth for BT mouse requires more power than USB RF receiver. Naively, I would think that BT uses more power since it's also transmits and not just receives (for pairing), but I would be happy if somebody could give more based answer.

In general I prefer a BT mouse, in order to keep (only two) usb ports free, but battery life time is important for me.

Thanks in advance,
Gil

 

Bluetooth could well use more power because it is designed to have a 10m or more range. Last year I found on the Samsung Q35 that having Bluetooth running also kept the CPU more active and significant hit the battery time. However, that may not affect other notebooks. It is easy to check by running the Performance Monitor (start > run > perfmon) and then looking at the time in the C3 power state.

John

 

I'm not an expert, but i don't think that there will be a significant difference betweeen the 2.

 

I was kind of in the same boat, picking between bluetooth and just a USB RF mouse. Bluetooth would be the nicest because no extra dongles or anything, but in order for me to use bluetooth I have to keep my WLAN and bluetooth on, and when running off battery, it can take some time off my battery life.

So in the end I chose a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse because it was a door crasher ($17.99) and it would probably be a bit easier on the battery.

 

My main thoughts exactly were the consumption between BT and RF, at the end I opted to get a VX Nano because of the USB dongle that you never have to remove. Even though it is a pretty pricey mouse it is a good one for basic needs and gaming to the extent that you know it's a wireless mouse.

 

I doubt it makes much of a difference, I have the tool to measure power consumption via AC so I can test if I get a BT mouse. I have the G7 witch uses the USB, and I have some BT devices like my headphones but not a mouse (however for the sake of things headphones will most definitely use more power if anything vs a mouse due to the higher bandwidth so I can still test if anybody is interested)

 

well, it's not only the laptop's current consumption we shoud be concerned about! it's the BT mouse which drains the batteries much faster than a RF one.

BT uses a time-division duplex (TDD) multiple-access scheme with 625-µs time slots, designed to communicate simultanously with multiple devices.

A RF USB dongle uses a point to point communication which consumes significantly less power on both sides!!

i'm about to buy a cordless now and my choice will most probably be: RF - because I'm not using any BT device right now and won't like the idea to turn BT on my ASPIRE 5920G on, I allready had problems with the BT drivers!!