Battery benchmarks tend to err on the side of casual use, offering higher numbers than many of us actually get on our laptops. If you want to know how long your battery will last under a strenuous workload, the popular Peacekeeper browser test can give you a good idea.
Mac: Os Track is a free app you leave running all the time in order to chart your historical system resource usage in a visually appealing but not-all-that-detailed way. Why would you do this? You can easily see if one app or another is hogging up your CPU or RAM way more than it should by looking at it historically, rather than just at discrete snapshots in time.
Windows only: Free application PC Wizard is a portable tool that analyzes and benchmarks your PC. At its most basic, PC Wizard gives you an in-depth look at your hardware and system specs. But the app has a surprisingly rich feature set beyond that, including a password recovery tool for apps like Outlook in the System Information tool and a slew of cool benchmarking tools. The benchmarks measure everything from your processor and RAM to hard drive performance and even MP3 compression speeds. As a cherry on top, PC Wizard is available in a portable version you can carry on your thumb drive. PC Wizard is freeware, Windows only. PC Wizard
