Acer Aspire One 751h Review

Netbook Battery Life Comparison

We run many scenarios for our battery life tests. Since most netbooks don’t include optical drives, we ripped our standard test DVD to a hard drive and copied those files over. Obviously there’s a benefit to not powering a spinning DVD, but even without that advantage the netbooks provide much better battery life than higher performance laptops. We also have DivX HD, and Xvid tests to show if there’s a difference in codec performance — as noted, smooth/acceptable x264 playback was not (currently) possible on the 751h.

Here’s where the compromise in choice of processor/chipset pays off. Acer is able to include a larger LCD panel but still provide very good battery life, nearly equaling the ASUS 1005HA in several tests. It’s particularly interesting to note that DivX and Xvid battery life is much closer than DVD battery life — odd considering the GMA 500 is supposed to have better MPEG-2 support than the GMA 950. Whatever the cause, the ASUS 1005HA offers 12 to 14% more battery life in most instances, but only 5% more battery life in Xvid playback in virtually identical playback during DivX decoding (a difference of less than 2%, which is about the margin of error for our battery life tests). The battery life relative to battery capacity puts things in perspective, and the 751h ends up trailing the ASUS 1005HA by just 2.5%.

Netbook Power Requirements

As a corollary to the battery life tests, we also performed measurements of power requirements using the AC adapters and a Kill-A-Watt device. These numbers are only accurate to the nearest Watt, so a difference of 1W (i.e. from rounding) could obscure up to a 12% actual difference in power requirements. Also note that power requirements change when you switch to DC power, so the battery life tests are a better indication of a true power requirements. Still, it’s interesting to see just how little power these netbooks consume relative to entry-level laptops — let alone your typical gaming desktop.

As you would expect, power requirements more or less mirror what we see in the battery life results. Without using EeeCTL to increase the brightness level on the 1005HA, it typically has the lowest power draw of the tested netbooks. Running a 3D application changes the situation slightly, but that’s mostly because the GMA 500 doesn’t perform nearly as fast as the (already slow) GMA 950.