Faulty Microsoft Driver Saps Intel Core Duo power

Critical_ writes "Tom's Hardware recently discovered a bug in Microsoft's ACPI driver implementation under Windows XP SP2 that causes a loss of more than one hour of battery time when connecting any USB 2.0 device to an Intel Core Duo based system. Apparently Microsoft, Intel and ODMs have known of this problem under a confidentiality agreement since July 12, 2005 via (a still private) Knowledge Base article KB899179. The bug lies in the asynchronous scheduler component inadvertently being left running causing Windows' internal task scheduler (ITS) to treat it as a running process involving the attached device. This in turn prevents the ITS from powering down the processor into one of the ACPI sleep states causing the system to use more battery power. At this time there seems to be no fix. Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected. This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems."

Comments

Re:confidentiality agreement

[nagora]

How does the shorter battery life make this defective?

OHH! That is such a dumb question! How does something draining your battery for no reason make it defective? How does something not working correctly make it defective? How does reducing the utility of your laptop mean that there's a defect? Jeez. I dunno!

You TWAT!

TWW

Re:And thanks to the confidiality agreement

[CountBrass]

Interesting article but why the FUD at the end? Last I checked Apple doesn't use Microsoft drivers so how could it possibly be a a problem for the new intel macs?

There *really* needs to be moderation of articles: this deserves a -1 flamebait, or the "editors" (I use the term loosely) need to do a better job.