Asus EeePC 900 Battery Life

These are real-world tests. I didn’t use any burning software, but instead did my usual day-to-day work, which involves Gmail, reading via my feedreader (Bloglines Beta), reading up various blogs, and also posting on blogs. And as such, being a real-world test, this involved some pauses in between for bathroom breaks, snacks, and such. And so you would notice a few minutes of “sleep” time in between, where I would close the Eee’s lid to save power.

This was done on an EeePC 900 12GB running (the OEM) Windows XP, updated to SP3. Brightness was at 30%, with WiFi on and audio muted. Note that I had turned off wired LAN in my BIOS, since I didn’t need to get wired, anyway. Camera was also turned off via EeePC tray utility.

Battery is the stock 4-cell battery rated at 7.2V, 5800 mAh.

Here are the results:

2:39 p.m. – Cold boot. Windows usually takes about 30 seconds to launch and another 25 seconds until SSD reads stop.

2:46 p.m. – Sleep. Sudden torrential downpour. And we have laundry hanging outside. And so I had to run out to bring the clothes under cover. Sigh. That’s working at home for you!

Uptime: 7 minutes.

2:59 p.m. – Wake up. Back to work. Am at my desk now, so I’m actually working on my bigger laptop at the same time.

3:31 p.m. – Auto sleep. Read a pretty long email on the bigger laptop, so I somehow left the Eee idle for 5 minuets–which is the idle time I’ve set Windows power management to put the machine to sleep.

Uptime: 32 minutes.

3:39 p.m. – Wake up. It’s a battery test, after all, so I’ve turned the Eee back on again to do some reading up on relevant forums.

4:37 p.m. – Sleep. The Eee actually spent another 5 minutse idle. Damn those long emails.

Uptime: 58 minutes

4:39 – Wake up. 5:55 p.m. – Sleep. No more rain. Brought clothes back out. Not that there’s any sunlight to help dry them faster, but it’s something one has to do.

Uptime: 76 minutes.

6:06 p.m. – Wake up. Battery meter is saying I only have less than an hour left.

6:23 p.m. – Battery LED is flashing LED.

6:32 p.m. – Windows is giving the critical battery alert. I figure I could still do a post, and I publish an article I’ve been writing on Blogging Pro.

6:39 p.m. – Power down.

Uptime: 33 minutes.

And so adding all those uptime minutes, we come to a round sum of 206 minutes. This translates to 3 hours and 26 minutes or roughly 3 and a half hours.

Strangely, that’s exactly how long BatStats estimated the 5800 mAH Asus battery to last.