Asus supplied us with a black Eee PC 901 with Windows XP a couple of days ago, which means we were finally able to finish our battery testing – the early Windows drivers on our first review model meant that our first batch of battery results were tentative.

The good news is that there’s a staggering increase in battery life once the Intel Atom processor’s power-saving features kick in. We’ve revised the original review accordingly, but you can read more about the final battery tests – and see some more images of the black Eee PC 901 – after the cut.

The Eee PC 901 has a 6600mAh battery as standard, which makes comparing battery life to the Eee PC 900 (with its 4400mAh battery) difficult. A bigger battery is bound to result in better battery life, but the Eee PC 901 also has another feature designed to make the most out of its time spent away from the mains. One of the shortcut keys above the keyboard is mapped to Asus "Super Hybrid Engine technology" and each press puts the laptop in "Super Performance", "High Performance", "Power Saving" and "Auto High-performance" modes.

When running on mains power, the Intel Atom N270 processor has a stock speed of 1600MHz under load and 800MHz when idling – this drops to 1200MHz/600MHz on battery power. The various Super Hybrid Engine technology modes simply modify this behaviour – “High Performance” locks the processor at 1600Mhz/800Mhz on both mains and battery power, while “Power Saving” locks it at 1200MHz/700MHz. “Super Performance”, on the other hand, overclocks the processor to 1800MHz/900Mhz, though it makes little difference to overall performance.

Our original set of battery tests for the Eee PC 901 were good, but not great – heavy use battery life was impressive at four and a half hours, but a mere five and a half hours for the light use test was pretty mediocre.

However, we can now blame that poor result on Windows XP not exploiting the Atom processors full arsenal of battery saving features. How do we know? Because with the Super Hybrid Engine technology software in place, the light use battery life for the Eee PC 901 soared to just over eight hours.

Read our full review of the Asus Eee PC 901 for the rest of the details and our final verdict.

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