“Which netbook has the better battery life?” It’s a question I haven’t heard too often but it’s one you should be asking yourself when you’re about to buy a netbook. The term “netbook” is being thrown about a lot but it doesn’t mean the same thing for battery life.

So far, we’ve tested a pretty decent range of netbooks available on the market not only for performance but also for battery life and we’ve found a considerable range of run times from the supplied batteries from as little as 1hr55mins to a massive 6hrs56mins.

Model
Battery Capacity
Battery Life (hours:mins)
MSI Wind U115 Hybrid
11.1V/5100mAh
6:56
Asus Eee PC 1000HD
7.4V/6600mAh
4:12
Asus Eee PC 901
7.4V/6600mAh
3:59
MSI Wind U100
11.1V/4400mAh
3:40
Asus Eee PC 1000H
7.4V/6600mAh
3:33
Asus N10J
11.1V/4800mAh
3:05
Dell Inspiron Mini 9
11.1V/2142mAh
3:05
Asus Eee PC S101
7.4V/4900mAh
2:41
Acer Aspire One AOA110
11.1V/2200mAh
2:19
Toshiba NB100
N/A
2:14
HP Mini 1001TU
11.1V/2342mAh
2:05
Lenovo IdeaPad S10
11.1V/2522mAh
1:55
Dell Inspiron Mini 12
14.4V/2200mAh
1:47

So far, MSI’s Wind U115 Hybrid is on top with an excellent 6hrs56mins followed by the Asus Eee PC 1000HD and 901 models. It shouldn’t surprise you that all three of these units feature six-cell batteries. HP, Lenovo and the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 share the bottom three places on the ladder with their three-cell batteries limiting run time.

Each netbook was tested with Australian PC User magazine’s UserBench Battery 2008 benchmark that I developed for the magazine in 2007.

The test involves continual playback of a WMV video clip with battery life being monitored until the battery gives up. Power management was set to “always on” with the screen and hard drive set to never switch off. These settings were chosen to give a worst-case scenario. With more aggressive power management settings, better battery life can be obtained but it should not get worse than this.

This obviously isn’t an exhaustive test but it does show that six-cell battery netbooks should last well over three hours while those with three-cell batteries will struggle, on average, to deliver better than two hours.

[EDIT: Why does the Wind U115 Hybrid get such a good result? It's C: drive is an 8GB Solid-State Drive (SSD), which enables the unit to switch off the 160GB D: hard drive if it's not being used. That, and the fact it uses a higher-capacity 5100mAh six-cell battery, also helps but certainly the SSD appears to make a difference here.]

[UPDATE: Someone has commented the list doesn't include Samsung's NC10 - this netbook isn't currently available in Australia.]

[UPDATE: The list is based on testing over the last 12 months on reviews carried out with my UserBench Battery 2008 software on netbooks as supplied to us by the various vendors. While batteries of higher capacity may now be available on some models, we tested with the batteries available at the time.]

[from http://netbookreview.darrenyates.com.au]

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