External battery update

As I wrote earlier Whitenergy's External battery is not that good for Asus eee 901... As it charges it 5% and jumps from battery to external to battery and so on - that may damage your battery or power socket! But lately i discovered that it can actually work well with my Netbook but it needs to be fully charged. When internal battery is fully (or almost, 98%) charged it can easly give enough power to use it on super high perfomance mode with unblocked multiplier and wifi on for 2-3 hours. Also it can be used to switch batteries when your are on move. WARNING! External bettery must be fully charged to give enough power to switch batteries (since the power drain will jump to 30 Watts when you still have internal battery at lower than 80% inside to switch it).

After 2-3h you would need to unplug external battery or when it starts to show you Battery power, external power messages spam. DO IT IMMIDIATELLY SO YOU WON'T DAMAGE YOUR EEE OR INTERNAL BATTERY! DON'T GO AWAY FROM YOUR NETBOOK WHEN YOU HAVE EXTERNAL BATTERY PLUGGED IN!!!

New Battery

Unfortunately old battery had 50% wear and it was lasting 4h at most... That was really a pain (as it is power saving netbook, it should last 7-8h). So i bought myself 8800mAh that costed me ~$100. Now netbook shows even 14-15h! (when it's really IDLE! That means it's taking ~4W of power! - turned off usb, wifi,lan,card reader etc). I bought this one cause I had problem getting whitenergy's (4 world) 11000mAh (as 12000mAh on some webpages) one. I hope to get the 11000mAh one on monday next week.

[In the picture, original battery on the right, 8800mAh replacement on the left]



8800mAh when fully charged has ~8h of use with wifi turned on and unlocked multiplier in power saving mode (? not sure, maybe it was high performance mode). It's not that bad but when adding 2200mAh (the battery im waiting for) it should make it 10h... That's good!

I will do some more tests when i get it =)

How long does it live?

Lasting on battery, power usage, charging time.

AFAIK Asus 901 has battery with highest capacity out there. It's 6600mAh/7.4v, huge, heavy one, letting you use netbook for quite a time.

BattStat shows capacity of 55272mW. That's a lot! Taking 55Watts of low profile computer system everywhere. Charging this baby takes up to 2 hours (or 3 if you stress it while charging).
Let's take a look how long it lasts fully charged.
First overclock it to 1680mhz with Asus' Super Hybrid Engine and play some game like GTA2 or Ragnarok Online. It lasts about 3-4hours on battery taking about 15Watts, that's not bad for running 3d games (of course you can try to underclock it and play games, maybe you will reach 5 or more hours =).

The lowest power usage i got was 5-6Watts(!!!), yes, no mistake here! But you need to turn off display or set the lowest brightness, underclock it to 1200mhz (or even block multiplier raising with SpeedSwitchXP), turn off any devices like camera, wireless or bluetooth. Now your netbook lasts 8-10 hours =)
Of course nobody wants netbook that does nothing, so let's find some lan wire and surf the net. If you leave it underclocked, it will take 7-10Watts, so 7 hours on battery if you are lucky. It takes about 1-2Watts more on wireless, and 1-3Watts more when overclocked.

If you run utorrent at night (of course downloading legal software =) while making it as powersavy as you can you will notice battstat showing 6-8Watts! That's nice for your power bill.


Watching movies eating your power =)

So let's see what video formats you can choose to watch on this smally.
As far as i tested Xvid works fine in SDTV resolution as well as in HDTV one (720p). Even AVC (h264/x264) works like a charm, of course SDTV one. The HDTV may bring you some problems especially when using softsubs (forget about o/cing to 1680mhz fixing your problem, you may still get frameskips).
So let's play some SDTV Xvid movie, now underclock it, wow no frameskips (no wonder it's just good old xvid), so fully discharging it will take some time. That said it's a good solution for long time watching on picnic or in school =)
Using AVC on powersaving mode may be a good idea as long as it is SDTV version. You may get a little more of your battery drain, but the quality is better.
As for HDTV, I didn't test xvid, but you may be able to play it in powersaving mode on unblocked multiplier. HDTV AVC as said above may be a bit of pain to play on this baby, as well your power usage will jump up a lot.