Akhter is a new company to What Laptop but it has been in business for close to years. When they got in touch and claimed they had a laptop with a battery that lasted 10 hours and cost a little over £500, we thought it deserved a test.
The Akhter AN825 (£539 inc. VAT) isn’t a miraculous long-life laptop, rather, it is a standard machine that comes with a larger than average battery pack. Extending 40mm from the back of the machine and running across two-thirds of the casing, this is fine if you don’t intend to travel with your laptop that often, but it’s not the most attractive of looks.
When it came to testing, we found in standard mode when running in High Performance mode, the Akhter lasted for a little over six hours, which is impressive.
The laptop comes with an eco-mode button that when pressed drops the specification down into a lower state of use. Even so, it only added a further hour to the laptop’s battery. While seven hours is great for those who need to be active all day, it’s hardly 10 hours.
You won’t be able to run anything too taxing in this lower mode but for everyday word processing and surfing the net we found it more than acceptable. Pressing the button instantly drops the laptop into eco-mode but we found it took up to 10 seconds for it to boot back up to full power.
We may have concentrated on the battery life of this machine but that is largely as it’s the machine’s main selling point. After all, the styling is a standard grey and silver plastic casing that feels robust and solid and errs on the side of practical.
Akhter supplies its laptops with a dual-boot setup, so you can opt between Windows Vista and Windows XP, so you won’t need to worry about compatibility problems with your older peripherals.
With an overall weight of 3.2kg, it isn’t the most portable of machines. Aside from the larger battery cell, the 15.4-inch Super-TFT screen adds to the size of the laptop. The panel is supported by an integrated Intel GMA 950 GPU, which is an older chip that will struggle with anything other than basic tasks and running DVD movies.
In terms of specification, you’ll find the specification is very much entry-level, with a 1.86GHz dual-core processor but the addition of 2048MB of memory means we found very little drag or slow-down with this laptop.
It would be a little too easy to dismiss the Akhter AN825 has a standard laptop with a large battery bolted on to the back, as the ability to drop down into eco-mode is something of an interesting feature. Beyond this, there is little about this machine to make it stand out from a host of entry-level laptops.
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