Comments on: Samsung NC10’s Battery Life Over 7 Hours, But at Low Brightness

By: Sista

Sista — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:19:01 +0000

I LOVE my Samsung. I’m SO glad it gets such great reviews. YEAH Long Live My Samsung!!!!!!

By: Ray

Ray — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:30:18 +0000

CHEATED:
I also feel cheated by ARGOS – their NC10 is also powered by the low battery 2200mAh – I’m getting about 2hrs and 15minutes max, just with email and browsing.

I bought this primarily on the good reviews regarding the battery life.

Buyers beware – DEMAND the 5400mAh – and you may get 4 or 5 hours – even Amazon don’t tell you which battery you are going to get !

By: John Stedman

John Stedman — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:37:17 +0000

I too have bought the NC10 from Comet and then found that the battery supplied is the 3 cell 2200mAh version which lasts 3 hours at best. I feel cheated and have voiced my concern to Comet. I wonder if this is case for Trading Standards as at the time of purchase I said to the Sales Assistant that the reason for replacing my laptop with the NC10 was the battery life advertised in reviews of the NC10 – he didn’t mention this was a cut down version (though proving this may be difficult unless there are a lot of us that have been misled by this big name in the high street). I feel very cheated.

By: John A

John A — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:35:09 +0000

The battery life tests are interesting. However tne NC10 Ibought from Comet (UK) last week only achieves 3hours 10 minutes or so. Close inspection of the “Standard” battery showsit to be 2200mHa. What “standard” battery was in the machine you tested and did you upgrade the battery before the tests?

I have set the screen to three bar brightness setting but have not a clue how to disable the bluetooth which I do not use

There was no indication on the box or the shelf ticket that Comet were selling a low rated machine. I suspect they are pulling a fast one – beware!

By: jason chu

jason chu — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:01:56 +0000

Um, why would a company issue specs at 800Mhz PC6400 SODIMMS AND INSTALL
the same but then allow you to use PC5300 at 667 MHZ?

wouldnt they just buy the PC5300 which is cheaper and more prevalent in the open market?

just so you know I have pc5300 in my NC10 but only for the last 30 min and it seems fine but there are some slow downs from time to time in Gtalk and gmail.

this is the same problem i have with my acer aspire so i have to assume it is the atom processor and not the ram..

i am worried about the ram though… again … why would samsung issue a spec and pay more for PC6400

even crucial.com cites pc6400

By: Thurstan

Thurstan — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:59:27 +0000

I’ve been using the Samsung NC10 for 2 months now and absolutely love it. The keyboard is awesome, battery life is as advertised (unlike many other laptops) I have consistantly had 5-6 hours of battery life with wifi turned on or a 3G broadband dongle in (brightness on 3 bars).

It is in no way a underpowered machine. I thought because it was running on a 1.6ghz atom meant for internet enabled phones that it wouldn’t be able to do much more than the browsing that netbooks are generally thought to be for. I have found this to be incorrect. I have the full adobe suite on my NC10 and have been editing photos in photoshop and picasa without considerable delay. Certainly it is a few degrees slower then the Mac Pro I use for design at work, but hey I’m travelling and this thing is seriously small, so I’m quite happy to take a hit in performance.

I’m part way through pimping out my netbook. I’ve upgraded the ram to 2GB, which has helped considerably particularly when running dreamweaver & photoshop. I’ve bought a Logitech Nano, with it’s nano receiver you can just leave it in perminantly without worry as the usb dongle only sticks out 8mm.

I’m about to buy a WD 500Gb My Passport Elite and swap the internal 160Gb drive so that I can continue taking travel pics (I use an Canon 450D set to RAW + JPG, it’s amazing how many gigs you can go through). Then it will be complete.

Other things to love about this laptop: The included samsung software to ghost the install drive. I have several ghosts now depending on the task I want to use the netbook for. I’ve ended up just using the full install as it has not slowed down significantly. My bag strap broke and the NC10 landed on a hardwood floor on it’s corner. The panels poped apart, but the screen was fine and everything else worked and felt just fine after poping the panels back together. It runs a 24in LCD at native 1920×1200 res flawlessly.

Gripes: Bluetooth does not have it’s own light or on/off button, the glossy cover shows any fingermarks – I would have prefered matte.

I actually only upgraded to this netbook after I replaced two Advent 4211Cs in the space of three weeks. The advents felt sturdy and were about £40 cheaper, but one developed screen issues and the other showed signs of screen issues, but a day or two later I noticed it would only work when the power cable was in. I was very disappointed with these Advents so I changed to this Samsung NC10 and have been enjoying it ever since.

By: Byla

Byla — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:57:46 +0000

The other issue that’s received little discussion is the fact that XP probably won’t take advantage of the extra G unless you are opening lots of big programs which you probably wouldn’t be doing on this half pint laptop. I wonder the battery usage impact of the extra G of memory. Every little hurts and you can’t turn it off if you don’t think you need it like the backlight. I’m getting ready to order and don’t think the extra memory is needed until MS 7 is available and I doubt I’ll be willing to pay for that upgrade on what is suppose to be a lowend machine. If MS 7 were available now, well that would be a different story.

By: Byla

Byla — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:45:13 +0000

It’s funny that people seem to be worried about the memory speed 533/667/800 and there is so much written about which speed to use when in this case, the CAS Latency is what we should all be worried about. If the original was CL5, it seems safest to stick with that, but I don’t know if you can buy something with better latency performance which might bump up performance a little. I have seen CL6/7 so that would slow it down. With desk tops, we use to look at CL2 vs CL3 and the CL2 got you better performance. You had to adjust it in your BIOS settings. Now some memory comes with an additional chip on the card that reports specs like CL level to the computer but I don’t see such a chip on most of the laptop modules. I’ve never seen any CL4 offered either. If the chipset only support 533 than 533/677/800 will be fine. Manuals use to show you all the BIOS settings, now it’s hard to dig this information out.

By: Jipé

Jipé — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:39:44 +0000

hi all,

concerning the memory module, does anybody knowws what’s about the CAS Latency to choose ? It seem’s original module is CL5,..

Regards,
Jipé

By: odinchong

odinchong — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:39:43 +0000

Thank you for your amazing and detailed test that I am going to buy a NC10.

As your test mentioned that brightness is so important of its battery life, but there is some different cases with the brightness. I have held another test with Battery Eater with its Classic mode, and found that 37.5% brightness can endure 4:46 but 80% brightness is 4:42. The effect of the brightness has been eliminated by higher workload.

On the other hand, workload may be one of the most important factor of a netbook’s battery life — even netbook is mostly designed for web-surfing because I have test NC10 with a idle Safari and lasting for amazing 8:01. Thus, I have written a web page (http://www.derhbf.com/test1.htm) for testing NC10’s web-surfing — because flash-based web need much more CPU usage to handle, and my website is formed by 1 flash video, 1 flash 3-D animation and 2 blank pages, each page will be redirect to another page after 3 min that kept NC10’s CPU usage higher and Speedstep kept its clock on 1.6 GHZ in most of the surfing process.

Finally, the result is as long as your testes (6:46), but when I changed the setting to Speed Mode (Max CPU) with 37.5 brightness, it still last for 6:12! Actually, we are seldom surfing on the web in these kind of flash all the day, so it is reasonable to say that NC10 may endure almost 7 hours for web-surfing in CPU ma — Yes, I think web-surfing time is also significant for Netbooks.

If you need the detailed test data, please vist:
http://www.umpcfever.com/news/?postid=1623