Asus Ion-Powered Eee PC 1201N Review
Battery Performance
In the past, we've had some ups and downs with regard to Asus battery life claims. Mainly, the gaming laptops have underwhelmed us, while the netbooks have surprised us. Thankfully, the Eee PC 1201N continues the netbook trend, as its battery life was right on par with what we expected--and amazingly, it wasn't too far off from the company's claims. Asus tells us that the 6-cell battery here is good for up to 5 hours of usage when fully charged. That's of course an optimal figure, so you can realistically expect between 3-4 hours of actual use when really using your machine away from the AC outlet.
As you'll see in the chart above, we notched 3 hours and 23 minutes of life with the screen on 50% brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth flipped on with BatteryEater Pro running in the background in order to mimic "real-world" work going on. This test has proven accurate in actually simulating a reasonably heavy workload in order for us to give you a figure that you can bank on when using your rig on the go.
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Around 3.5 hours on a dual-core machine with an Ion GPU isn't too bad, particularly when this was being "used" constantly by BEP. You could easily stretch that to 4-5 hours if you killed the wireless options or put it to Sleep every now and then while you took a break. Asus' 5 hour battery life figure is actually attainable on the Eee PC 1201N. Kudos!
As you'll see in the chart above, we notched 3 hours and 23 minutes of life with the screen on 50% brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth flipped on with BatteryEater Pro running in the background in order to mimic "real-world" work going on. This test has proven accurate in actually simulating a reasonably heavy workload in order for us to give you a figure that you can bank on when using your rig on the go.
;)
Click To Enlarge
Around 3.5 hours on a dual-core machine with an Ion GPU isn't too bad, particularly when this was being "used" constantly by BEP. You could easily stretch that to 4-5 hours if you killed the wireless options or put it to Sleep every now and then while you took a break. Asus' 5 hour battery life figure is actually attainable on the Eee PC 1201N. Kudos!
