subject: battery laptop power--Acer laptop claims 8-hour battery life , you best battery shops [print this page] battery laptop power--Acer laptop claims 8-hour battery life , you best battery shops
We've yet to see a Windows laptop with battery life longer than 5 7 hours, unless we add an extended battery to the system. But when Acer launched its new series of laptops this week, one big push was for longer battery life.
[UPDATE: As one of our readers pointed out, we previously had in our Ratings a 13-inch Sony Acer aspire 5920 battery (in the company's Z series line) with a tested battery life of over 6 hours. Our current Ratings of laptop computers (available to subscribers) also details several recently-tested Windows notebooks that also run for more than 5 hours, but those used an extended battery. Ed.]
With its Aspire Timeline, Acer is claiming 8 hours of battery life. That's the same time Apple claims for its MacBook Pro 17-inch laptop, a figure we recently put to the test.
Behind the Aspire's longer life, says Acer, is the combination of Intel Core 2 Duo ultra-low voltage processors and Intel Display Power Savings Technology (Intel DPST), which Intel says "reduces the display backlight with minimum visual impact."
Acer had the longest Acer as07b41 battery life in our recent netbook Ratings, (available to subscribers) with its 10-inch Aspire One lasting 9 hours in our tests. We'll see if its new 11.6-inch Aspire One netbook, also launched this week, lives up to its predecessor's battery life as soon as we get our hands on one.
Where there's power, of course, there can also be heat, especially now that batteries are cramming more power into less space. The Timeline laptops will use another Intel technology to reduce heat by redirecting airflow to the bottom side of the chassis and the wrist rest areas.
While we of course can't yet say how well that cooling technology might work, when it comes to heat, acer laptop batteries have run cooler than the competition in our tests in recent years. (Our laptop testing actually includes a "lap test" that measures the temperature of the bottom of the laptop after it's been stressed; see minute 3:10 our Laptop Buying Guide video. The hottest laptops, thermally speaking, have been models from HP and Apple.)
