New Laptop using as little as 5 watts
 

So I bought a new laptop/net book after my old one stopped putting up with my abbuse, my old one was an Asus Eee 900 and after 4 years the 40 watt hour battery was still lasting at least 2 hours, plugged in the power saving features turn off automaticly and it would draw 12-15 watts.
My new one is the Asus Eee 1018, with I belive a 44 watt battery, plugged in it draws 8 watts while using a web browser jumping up to 10-12 watts for a second or two if I ask it to work harder, now I don't think it will let me use less power while plugged in, but if I unplug it the power saving features kick in and it's 44 watt battery pack right now says it's at 95% charge and will run dead in 7 hours and 50 minutes, so it's using about 5 watts!
Much better then the desk top computer that I had 10 years ago that would use 250 watts or more and wasn't nearly as fast.

man it's amazing how many improvements can be made in a few years. No idea how much my laptop uses but seems like you have an eco-friendly laptop

Does anyone on here have power use of their lap top?
It seems like I've read that the average lap top uses 25-35 watts and that is why I was excited about how little this one uses, right now it's plugged in to the kill-a-watt and using 9 watts with the performace option set to it's highest/fastest option.

This little unit is sweet! I'll have one to replace this laptop..

fit-PC2

Fit-PC 2 smallest nettop

I'm pretty sure my laptop (which is a bit of an energy hog while in use) uses about 30W just plugged in. 9W is awesome!

The only thing I don't like a lot about netbooks (and this is probably a mute issue now a days) is that the one I've used didn't really have enough power to watch video online seamlessly. It wasn't quite able to keep up with even a youtube video which is relatively low quality. How does yours work for this Ryland?

Nettops are supposed to be able to do light tasks like browsing the internet, updating Facebook, and doing e-mail. They're more of a replacement for a telephone than a laptop. A 9" screen, miniature keyboard, and Atom processor really aren't for me. Of course, nothing I'm interested in can touch the numbers that CNet measured for the Eee: 6.34W idle, 13.36W load.

netbooks are the small tiny laptops like you're discussing.

nettops are tiny little PC's that you attach regular keyboard, mouse and monitor to. Internally the are basically the same as a netbook except no battery. I'd guess that most non gaming users out there could get away with a machine of their power but they are borderline. The issue with youtube is most(all?) graphics cards can't hardware accelerate the flash video so it is up to the main CPU to do it and thats really pushing these little atom based pc's hard. Flash sucks. Most high def video can be hardware accelerated on new graphics cards though so the CPU doesn't bog right down trying to play a movie.

I have NetFlix On-demand and have no issue watching a streaming movie, battery life drops by about half while watching a movie so I only get a bit over 4 hours of movie watching on battery power, I haven't watched alot of YouTube but I don't see why that would take more power then watching a full screen movie.
I have large hands and blunt finger tips and have no problem typing on the netbook keyboard, my old 9" netbook has a smaller key board and I never had an issue touch typing on it either, took maybe half an hour to get used to the first time I used it, of course a $2 used USB key board and mouse also work well if that is what you need.
I also like that it's small enough to fit in the pocket of my cargo pants, making it easy to free up my hands to take it with me.

Electric wise I doubt you'd notice a difference. CPU usage wise there can be a huge difference. Many of the newer GPU's can handle decoding high definition video and do it in their sleep. CPU's aren't optimized to handle it so on "slower" processors like the Atom based CPU's you can really work them hard to process the video. The newer Atom's hand as much video as they can over to the GPU's but flash is one that can't be handled on GPU's last time I checked. So Youtube is handled entirely by the CPU which on an atom chip can really slow the system down. On my quad core 900e most video is handled by the GPU on my nvidia card so my wife can watch 1080p video on the bigscreen without me noticing but flash is handled in the CPU so youtube makes a noticable spike in usage on one of the cores.

I just tried a few full screen YouTube Videos and they played just fun, jumped forward a few times and it was pretty smooth, so at least with this CPU (dual core Intel Atom N550) I'm not seeing any issues altho Flash video did draw a bit more even from the battery but while the video was playing it still gave an estimated run time of over 3 hours, closed that window and it jumped it up to just over 5 hours left.
Not sure why, but I haven't found any common task other then gaming (not in to gaming) that this netbook has trouble with even with those who have said I should be having trouble with this or that, anything else I should try tossing at it?