Asus A7J 17-inch Core Duo Notebook Review

The Battery

Because the A7J is a 17″ laptop, you shouldn’t expect super long life while running on batteries; the A7J isn’t exactly marketed to be a roadwarrior’s mobile computer. To test the longevity of the battery we use two test conditions: brightness at 100% and WiFi enabled, and brightness 50% and WiFi turned off. We then run three tests under these conditions to get a good picture of what the battery is capable of.

All tests show that the A7J  barely lasts 2 hours, this includes a conservative “office” workload synthesized by both MobileMark ’05 and BatteryMark 4.01. When completely loaded using BatteryEater Pro, the A7J lasts just 1 hour and 19 minutes, which is surprisingly still a bit better than the Compaq V2410.

You will notice that Asus did not publish the expected battery life for the A7J, but instead only tell you the specifications for the battery. So I can’t say if the battery life we’re seeing in the lab is what Asus expects of the A7J.

Power4Gear

To help conserve battery life, Asus has a utility called Power4Gear. By using the Power4Gear power saving option, you can select different power configurations that suit your needs. For example there’s a profile for presentations which dims the LCD, or a CD-audio profile that dims the LCD to just 6% and throttles down the CPU from 1.66 GHz to 1 GHz. Certain profiles (like CD-audio) are only available when running on batteries.

To make switching between these profiles easier, Asus has a quick-access button located above the keyboard which you can use to cycle through and select the profile you want.

Battery Not Upgradable?

As mentioned earlier in the Upgradability section, because the battery is located near the front and sits flush with the molded laptop body, it doesn’t look like the battery is upgradable to anything larger than 8 cells because there isn’t any room for it on the base of the laptop. Other laptops are designed with the battery at the back so a larger battery pack can be installed and it will just portrude from the rear of the laptop, but not the A7J.