Battery and Mobile Mark
The W2J we received for review came loaded with the standard 8-cell battery. From the way the battery is positioned on the laptop, it may be possible to upgrade the battery but the Asus website does not state this.
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.
Testing is done with all forms of power savings disabled. This is done to give the most consistent and comparable results across multiple laptop platforms. The numbers you see in these tests are the “worst case” scenario, so expect longer battery when you properly enable power savings in Windows.
In Battery Life, we can see that the Asus W2J’s battery is fairly good with over 2 hours of juice in office productivity (Battery Mark) and DVD playback. With the system completely loaded using Battery Eater Pro, the W2J squeaks out just under an hour and a half. It’s the longest lasting 17″ laptop we’ve reviewed so far by a slim margin!
With the brightness at 50% and the Wireless antenna turned off, the W2J is most similar to the Dell XPS M1710.
At 100% brightness and with the Wireless turned on, we see the Asus W2J managing over 2 hours of continuous run-time, which puts it 12 minutes more battery time compared to the Dell XPS M1710. Turning on power conservation will improve your life line of course.
In Mobile Mark’s office Productivity test, the W2J gives us nearly 2.5 hours of runtime and 163 minutes of wireless web browsing.
