Netbook Battery Life Shootout
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The netbookreview website of Australia recently carried out some testing to see which of the current crop of netbooks available in Australia provided the best operating time. To cut a long story short, they tested with playing a WMV (Windows Media Video format played using the Windows Media Player) continuously, with power management was set to always on, and the screen and hard disk never being put to sleep or spun down. Granted, this is an extreme test with the hard disk spinning all the time to play the video file, and actual usage scenarios wouldn't be this extreme. So, by looking at the numbers below, you will likely get a longer run time than the test results. The test wasn't exactly an apple-to-apple comparison because:
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- not all netbooks used the same processor - some used the Atom N series, some the Z series, with the Z series processor giving some additional power saving options.
- battery capacity of netbooks tested differ, both in terms of mAh as well as the number of cells. Obviously a 6 cell is going to give a longer run time compared to a 3 cell!
- one of the top netbooks, the Samsung NC10, wasn't tested because it wasn't available in Australia (nor is it available in Malaysia, which is a big pity).
- while most used traditional hard drives, the netbook with the longest run time used a hybrid system of traditional hard disk and a solid state drive.
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