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I’ve been testing an Acer Aspire 1410 for close to two weeks now, thanks to the fine folks at B&H who sent me a demo unit to review. And while it feels snappier than most Intel Atom powered netbooks I’ve used over the past year or so, I hadn’t really spent a lot of time putting it to the test. I’m not one for benchmarks that spit out a bunch of numbers. I prefer real-world tests that involve actions I’m actually likely to perform on a laptop.

With that in mind, I did two quick tests yesterday. I converted a 30 minute WAV file to MP3 using WinLAME, and I compressed a 2 minute video shot with my digital camera to Xvid using VirtualDub. I did both of these tests using exactly the same media files on the Acer Aspire One 1410 with a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 CPU and an Asus Eee PC 1000H with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor. Both laptops were running Windows 7 RC.

Here are the results:

Video test:

• Acer Aspire 1410: The test took 2 minutes, 41 seconds to complete, with an average frame rate of around 17 frames per second
• Asus Eee PC 1000H: The test took 6 minutes and 8 seconds to complete, with an average frame rate of less than 8 frames per second

Audio test:

• Acer Aspire 1410: It took about 1 minute, 10 seconds to convert a 30 minute WAV audio file to MP3
• Asus Eee PC 1000H: It took about 3 minutes, 5 seconds to convert the same file to MP3

We’ve already seen that the Aspire 1410 has better graphics than most netbooks, and can comfortably play a relatively old real-time strategy game like Age of Mythology as well as 1080p video playback. And the computer feels more responsive when flipping through multiple browser tabs or a number of running programs. But as these test results show, the processor packs quite a bit more oomph when it comes to CPU intensive tasks like audio and video conversion.

Of course, the down side is that the Core 2 Solo processor is more of an energy hog than the Intel Atom processors found in most netbooks. So the Acer Aspire 1410 gets good, but not great battery life. But I’ll have more on that when I publish a complete review of this laptop.