ASUS T9 Notebook

Performance - BatteryMark 2001

In addition to speed, a notebook's battery life is another quantitative number that can be measured using benchmarks. To see how long our ASUS T9 would last under batter power we used Ziff Davis Media's/eTesting Labs' Business Winstone 2001 BatteryMark 1.0. We were forced to use BatteryMark over alternative battery performance benchmarks such as PCMark 2002 because the result that BatteryMark gives is much more relevant. Although we wanted to use the newer PCMark 2002, especially considering that it runs properly under Windows XP, an operating system that BatteryMark does not support, we were displeased with the Battery Tests included in PCMark 2002. While BatteryMark runs a system through Business Winstone 2001 tests and measures how long the system lasts before the battery is completely drained, PCMark 2002 runs a system through its synthetic tests and measures not how long the system will run in total but how many runs of the synthetic tests the computer will do before the battery drains to a user defined level. The PCMark 2002 readme file suggests that the number of times the synthetic tests can complete before the set battery level is reached indicates how well a system performs under battery power; this statement is true but it provides very little real world value.

Instead, BatteryMark 2001 directly shows how long a system lasts when performing common tasks (such as Office 2000, Netscape, and Norton AntiVirus). The test cycles the battery to make sure optimal charge is reached and then performs the battery life test multiple times to reduce error in reporting. As mentioned in the test section, BatteryMark tests were performed using ZDM's recommended settings.

When the tests were complete, we were left with two battery life numbers which we added together and took the average of to represent how long the notebook runs under battery power. The result:

2 hours 33 minutes

This fell exactly in the T9's printed rundown time of 2-2.5 hours. The workload of the BatteryMark 2001 tests is rather difficult so this run time probably represents the lower end of what the ASUS T9 can do. If all that you are using your laptop for is typing in Microsoft Word, expect battery life to be even better than this.

The 2 hour and 33 minute run time of the T9 is fairly typical of the run time we see in many desktop speed notebooks and is even better than some high powered ones.

Performance - Boot Time

As we mentioned before, the amount of time required to get from a cold boot to the Windows desktop is fairly important in the notebook world. Having to wait for a system to boot can often be the difference between getting something written down or forgetting it. We tested to see how long it took the ASUS T9 to go from of to on and found the following:

Boot Time (seconds) ASUS T9400 ASUS T9400 Battery Power 34 35 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42

As you can see, it took about 35 seconds for our T9 to be fully ready to go. Like the other tests in this review, the boot time was measured on a fresh install of Windows XP Professional. The test was begun as soon as the power button was hit and stopped as soon as the hour glass cursor changed to the standard cursor on the Windows XP Professional desktop.