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.

Surfing in the kitchen

INFO! The device still works (19th of July, 2015) but SDDs in it degradated so much it's mostly useless unless booted from external USB device. The original battery was replaced long time ago but extended Whitenergy battery is still ok, having 20% wear level. Though I don't use it much. Moved to 8 inches Windows 8.1 tablet that was 1/3th of this netbook's price and even with 1GB RAM it's working pretty awesome.


Everybody knows what laptop is. But do they know what netbook is?



Netbook is a small computer that you can put into your small bag (like 250x200) and carry it everywhere like people do with other notebooks. It's not as powerful as workstation or any other laptop but it's easier to carry and lasts longer on battery, providing quite fast internet access, document editing or ability to play some older games like GTA2, Traffic Giant etc.
It's something between pocket pc and laptop, doesn't have internat DVD (CD) though so it may be a bit of pain but you still can use virtual cd.


Most netbooks are based on 1.6ghz Atom processor and 1GB RAM. What does that mean?

That means it's not as powerful as Pentium M 1.6ghz (Atom doesn't support out of order commands), you can compare it with 1.1 or 1.2ghz one. But it does support Hyper Threading technology far better than Pentium 4 did (big plus for this - you can compress files and surf the net at the same time without much slowdowns!).


There are two versions of storage type used in netbooks!

Do you know what hard drive is? It's a storage drive with magnetic plates using mechanical parts to store all your files. It has nice, fast file access but may be easy damaged when you accidentally drop your netbook on the floor.
What's the other storage type? It's SSD, aka Solid State Drive. It's like a pendrive stored inside of your netbook providing slower reading/writing but takes less power and is almost immune to any vibrations... The bad news about it is that it has far less storage space and sometimes is slows down so much that your firefox hangs for 10-30 seconds (THAT'S REALLY BAD!).
"If I can't surf internet well then i would rather buy hard drive one since there is no other way around" atually there is, all you need is ramdrive: you need to install RAMDISK by lyh728 the same way like you install any other hardware in your windows XP.
You then run ramdisk.exe and set ramdrive letter and size, copy your firefox profile from your document and settings to ramdrive (or if you don't know where it is just leave it there, you will create new one), run "somedirectory\firefox.exe -P" w/o "" and create new profile, name it ramdrive profile or something else then point it to drive letter of your ramdrive (R: in my case), select that it's your default profile (unless you want to run firefox with -P switch everytime you want to use ramdrive one). Wait for web browser to open, close it, go to your ramdrive and pack it to rar or zip (or use ramdisk frontend and save image). Why? Because when you reboot your netbook it will get empty 'cause it's stored in your ram memory. Remember to decompress your rar file after reboot, if you don't firefox will blame you for having open firefox window you don't have =) That's it!

I will post more when i feel like it =P

Mr_KrzYch00