Real battery life numbers with Asus EEE 1000H?

Question

I am looking to buy a netbook with the longest possible battery life. There are many questions dealing with the topic of battery life in netbooks, but very few replies contain precise numbers. So, my question is this:

How long can you use your Asus EEE 1000 with a single battery charge?

By the wording, I would like to emphasize that I am looking for exact numbers from actual owners. Also, please include in a few words the type of workload under which you measured the given battery life.

Answer 1

I've been using my 1000HE almost every day. I use it as my primary computer at home, so it plays music, plays videos, syncs with my iPod, browses the web, and does a little bit of software development. Using wireless internet drains the battery faster than any specific programs, for the most part.

It's 6 months old, and definitely holds a charge for at least 4.5 to 5 hours, even on fairly heavy usage. I haven't done comprehensive tests, but I've made it last over 7 hours if I turn down the screen and do less resource-intensive tasks.

edit: I'm using the default installation of Windows XP.

Answer 2

Depending on use I get 3-5 hours (that is after 6 months wear and tear), but also had less than two without being able to tell what exactly I did to make the run time tank.

Answer 3

I am writing from an eeepc 1000 (atom n270, 1GByte RAM and 40GB ssd drive) with cruncheee installed. I use it almost like a desktop pc for opengl graphics programming, web surfing, movies etc, so with a medium workload. The battery life is more than satisfying: it lasts never less than 3 and half hours.

The most interesting think is that it didn't changed much from when I bought it more than one year ago, when it lasted almost 4 hours and 30 minutes.

Answer 4

the ASUS EEE 1000 HE is definitely the netbook delivering the longest battery life, the claim of 9.5 hrs is not realistic but i do get well over 7 hours out of it which is pretty much unrivaled in this class and certainly a big improvement over the 1000H which was only good for 5 hrs tops.

the Acer Aspire 1810TZ-412G25N Timeline is not really a netbook despite its 11.6" display (core 2 duo processor, 2 GB RAM) but it boasts a whopping 12+ hrs battery life (test/review). the price is around 500 euro.

Answer 5

I've bought the machine, so here are my own results.

Thanks to all of you, your reports and my results are very close. With very light load, like Vim, I can get 9 hours of battery life. When I do browsing, changing between apps a lot etc., but still nothing particularly CPU-intensive, it can manage about 7.5-8 hours. Based on wattage measurements, severe load, like e.g. playing Diablo II on wine would drain the battery in about 5.5 hours, but that's an extrapolation.

If you are a Linux user, and you want extra hours for free, use powertop. It's a tool that besides measuring CPU wakeups per seconds, is able to fine-tune a number of power saving options. Including the single most important one, SATA power saving, enabling which saves about 0.7 watts. By comparison, disabling an idle Wifi saves 0.3 watts only.

If you need time, watch the watts, powertop or gnome-power-statistics are both good. The latter seems to be a bit off, it shows values about 0.5 watts lower than what can be calculated by multiplying ACPI voltage and current values, still, it has a nice graph.

What you won't be saving much power with, so don't even bother:

• turning down the HDD
• disabling X or GNOME, at least on contemporary distros (I use Ubuntu 9.10)

Answer 6

An excellent review can be found here. This article states some exact numbers, including the "video playback battery drain test" results, which is 411 minutes (6 hrs 51 mins). To my surprise, it outperformed the 1000HE, which lasted 381 minutes (6 hrs 21 mins).

Answer 7

I've had a 1000H for close to a year. I have 2GB RAM and the 160GB hard drive. Battery life has been good. I used to get over 7 hours when I had screen brightness turned pretty low and the processor speed utility set on "Power saving" and used it for light word processing tasks and browsing over a wireless connection. Daily use for around a year has worn the battery down a little bit, now I think I get only five hours or a little more.

Answer 8

I have a 1000HE. Very similar. I get a solid 7 to 8 hours with only some powersaving stuff done, like dimming the screen. When i first got it i could coax a nice 10 hours of it.

Heavy use, 8+ hours a day usually, opensuse linux, but i got roughly the same on XP.