Asus W7J 13.3 inch Portable Core Duo Notebook Review

Battery

The W7J we received for review came loaded with the standard 6-cell battery, which makes the unit here the lightest configuration possible for the W7J. If you want something with a bit more juice, then you can also get the W7J with a 9-cell battery.

To test the capabilities of our laptop sample we run three battery benchmarks: Battery Eater Pro, Battery Mark 4.01, and Mobile Mark 2005. Battery Eater Pro is a benchmark that loads the system using graphics, memory, and hard drive activity. Battery Mark is an older benchmark that simulates a typical office productivity by running sessions of MS Word and Excel. Mobile Mark 2005 is a bit different and deserves a separate section below.

With brightness at 50% and WiFi turned off, the W7J has battery performance nearly the same as the 17′ Dell M1710 gaming laptop, which is surprising since we’d expect longer life from a 13.3′.

Compared to the 12′ W5F with an 6-cell battery, the W7J achieves almost the same scores in Battery Eater and DVD playback. A possible explanation for this apparent discrepancy is because DVD playback and Battery Eater load up the system more than just a simple productivity load like in Battery Mark. Basically, Battery Mark is a much simpler test with less battery consumption, so the differences between power units will be more pronounced.

With the WiFi enabled and brightness at 100%, there is little difference compared to when WiFi is turned off and brightness down to 50%.

Mobile Mark 2005

Mobile Mark 2005 is a benchmark that runs three tests while the laptop is running on batteries: office productivity (i.e. Excel, Word, Outlook); DVD playback; and Wireless activity. Each test begins with the laptop charged to 100% and is put through the test until the batter is depleted, at which point the test stops and gives a score in minutes.

Overall Mobile Mark gives you a measurement in terms of how long the battery lasts while performing a specific action, and how much of that action you can perform during that time. For each test, the brightness of the display was set to 100%.

In the Mobile Mark results above, we see the W7J falling a bit behind the W5F thanks to the extended battery on the W5F. Otherwise the W7J has some strong battery life with nearly 3 hours under general wireless web surfing and 2.5 hours in an office environment.

Though the batter life is a bit shorter than the W5F, the W7J scores about the same in the overall Mobile Mark score because it’s capable of doing more work in less time.