Law Technology

Eee PC Battery Test ? 7 Hours, 29 Minutes

By Andrew Flusche

I was at an all-day seminar last week, sporting my Asus Eee 1000HE netbook. I brought my AC adapter, but I figured it would be a great chance to really test Asus’ claimed 9.5-hour battery.

I started the day at about 8:45am with a fully-charged battery.

When I decided to actually watch the meter, I tweeted that I had 93% left. The battery meter estimated 7:42 hours.

I kept an eye on the battery meter for a while, and I realized the netbook wouldn’t make it all day at full power. At 10:17am, I turned off wifi and bluetooth. I also dimmed my screen to the lowest setting and exited unnecessary programs.

I put the netbook into sleep mode for about 20 minutes while I ate lunch. And I plugged it in for 1 minute, when I got scared that the battery wouldn’t last all day. But I quickly pulled the plug back out and decided to keep the test going.

After lunch, I still had over half my battery left: 53%.

At 2:15pm, I had 2:23 hours left on the meter, 33%.

The conference ended at 4:19pm. At that time, I had 4% left on the meter, an estimated 15 minutes.

To sum it up, the battery lasted 7 hours, 29 minutes (subtracting the 20 minutes in sleep mode at lunch time).

I ran Firefox and Word 2007 all day, but that’s about it. I did power on the wifi during a few breaks to check my email, but it stayed off most of the day.

I don’t think you’ll get 9.5 hours out of this battery, but 7.5 hours is nothing to scoff at. If you can plug in the Eee for a few minutes sometime during the day, I’ll bet you could keep trucking way past 8 hours.

Full post as published by Legal Andrew on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).