I have upgraded my computers lately, both at work and at home. I run Ubuntu on all of them and I thought I’d share my experience.
Battery run time
At home I have a Asus UL-30A 13″ laptop with a 8 cell battery with a advertised battery run time of 12 hours. Now, advertised battery run time isn’t the same as actual battery run time. According to tests with windows 7 the Asus runt about 9 hours, now Ubuntu is known to perform poorly in comparison with Win7 and battery run time. This is mainly due to that new laptops are optimized for Win7 and there are many new efficient power saving features.
My Asus UL-30A has a battery run time of about 8 hours with Ubuntu 10.04! That is more than I expected since I had read others claiming that it runs for about 6 hours. I use the computer mainly surfing the web with wireless, listening to music and watching online TV or Movies. I have full screen light and don’t use any special power saving options.
Hibernate/sleep on Asus UL30-A
The hibernate and sleep options work without any glitches or problems.
Web Camera & SD card reader
The web camera works out of the box. The camera isn’t the best but good enough for video chatting. The picture gets upside down in Skype… So i guess there are still issues to iron out for Ubuntu.
The SD card reader works but he card needs to be in the reader during boot…
Performance
I haven’t run any tests, there are plenty of performance tests out there. Everything runs smooth, the computer feels fast and there are no issues to report.
Summary
I can recommend running Ubuntu on Asus UL-30A. Its fast, stable and beautiful!
Do you have any other experiences, please share your thoughts by commenting!
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I’m kinda of rookie in Ubuntu!
But my battery has drastically reduced! I think now I’m getting about 4 hours which is about half the battery i get in win7!
did you make any special configs?
Hi
The battery time has decreased some for me as well but is still <7 hours. I have not done any special configs and have not compared against Win7… Hopefully the battery time in Ubuntu will increase with new releases, I think that Ubuntu have some work to do before they catch up to win7 when it comes to battery time.