Advent 4211 mini notebook

Dixons tempts with cut-price Wind

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

25th August 2008 08:02 GMT

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In addition to PCMark05, we ran our usual SCC benchmark using The Gimp's Gaussian Blur filter on a big image. The 4211 yielded a time of around 7.1s, neck-and-neck with the AA1 and a couple of seconds faster than the Eee PC 901's best speed setting.

Gimp Test Results

Time in Seconds
Shorter bars are better

Like the 901, the 4211 has a battery boost mode too. Press Fn+F10 and it underclocks the CPU to 800MHz, the better to eke out the battery's charge. You can see the performance to battery life balances these settings provide in the charts.

Battery Test Results

Time in Minutes
Longer bars are better
Note that the Wind used had a six-cell battery - the Advent tested had a three-cell power pack.

All these tests were conducted with Wi-Fi on, the screen set to maximum brightness and the sound at 50 per cent. We played a standard definition H.264 file using the VLC media player until the battery died. For more casual use, we reckon you can add an hour or so onto our timings.

Note that the 4211's 800MHz mode also drops the screen brightness considerably, but we turned the backlight back up for our test. The results show that the slower clock speed didn't make much difference to the battery life. Which goes to show how much more the screen and drive contribute to a laptop's overall power consumption.

Keeping the screen dimmed as per the power-saving setting saw the battery life rise to 108 minutes. Better, but not fantastic.