Ultrabook battery life is a primary concern for PC makers, and previous versions of the S7 offered an abysmal four hours of battery life during regular use. That’s not enough to get you through a typical flight, let alone a workday. Acer revamped the battery situation with their new S7-392 models and touts eight hours of battery life for the new ultrabook.
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Battery Eater Pro |
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Battery Life Testing |
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To put the Aspire S7 through its paces, we ran two tests. In the first test, the ultrabook refreshes a web page every few minutes until it taps the battery. If you were to do eight hours of casual Web surfing, this is the kind of battery life you might expect to see. For the second test, we run Battery Eater Pro, which gives the ultrabook a much heavier load, to approximate heavy use.
The Aspire S7 didn’t last the full eight hours Acer is promoting, but that’s not uncommon – our usage scenarios aren’t the same as Acer used to reach its eight-hour claim. More important is how the system performed compared to other ultrabooks, and for once, the S7 isn’t the clear winner. It lasted 2:01 (hours: minutes) in BEP, and 7:01 in our Web browsing test. Although that’s not as long as some of its competitors lasted, it’s close enough to still be very competitive.
