Acer Aspire S7-393 Review (2015): Refreshed With Intel's Broadwell

Name: Acer Aspire S7-393 Review (2015)
Brand: Acer

by David Murphy — Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 11:53 AM EDT

Battery Life

According to Acer, the Aspire S7-393 comes with a four-cell 6280 mAh battery that's supposed to last around 10 hours, at most. We didn't quite see that when we put the laptop to more strenuous use, but we got decently close when we were just doing some casual web browsing—lots of casual web browsing.

Battery Eater Pro and Web Browsing Tests

Battery Life Testing

We run two tests to give you a sense of how long the system will last under light and heavy use. Our web browsing test is a light-use scenario in which we refresh a webpage every 3 - 5 minutes, over a WiFi connection, until the battery is exhausted. The Battery Eater Pro test then gives the laptop a much heavier workload to simulate the kind of stress you might put on the machine with multiple resources engaged, including CPU, GPU, memory and hard drive.

We weren't expecting a battery life miracle with the S7-393, and we definitely didn't get one. It lasted a respectable 149 minutes in our battery eater test, which was pretty far from our lightweight leader's 221 minutes (though much better than, say, the 107 minutes of Dell's Latitude E7440).

On our Web browsing test, the Aspire S7-393 hit a much better 421 minutes (or seven hours, one minute). That said, this wasn't the longest time of the ultraportable laptops we've tested—nowhere close. Better-equipped laptops on the chart around lasted 10 hours or so during simple use, a much more likely use scenario for most people. At least, we presume you're more likely to do light work on your lightweight laptop than to tax it to 100% every waking moment.