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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."
This sort of thing should not be permitted. We arent talking about R&D agreements here, this is a *currently selling product*. They are hiding the fact its known defective from the consumer.
Isnt this a basis for a class action fraud suit? If not, it should be investigated by the SEC at least.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yet another reason to buy AMD. I dumped Intel back when I had a brandnew Celeron 400 and have never looked back. I see a class action lawsuit in the future :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/I bet they would not! They haven't used this kind of advertising for years - at least since Steve Jobs took over, I think. And that's good, the "Mac evangelist" thing would not fly nowadays.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Critical_ sees a typical Wintel bug and thinks Apple has a problem. It's an interesting thought, but not one to publish without checking.
APM and ACPI, designed in part by Microsoft, have always been secretive and buggy. Tricky hardware that constantly varies like Winmodems is the rule and I'm amazed the Linux works so well with any of it.
The only thing worse than the hardware has been Microsoft's software on top of it. While I'm able to keep laptops up for more then 40 days by using APM and hibernation or ACPI and suspend, my Microsoft using friends have to reboot. They tell me that their Word documents get corrupted on resume if the machine resumes at all. Cluster on cluster, all of their complex nasties designed to thwart competitors only bite them in the rear despite the fact they wrote the specs themselves and have hardware details no one else does. This is what to expect from non-free.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
for the last little while, I've been noticing that my compaq R3000 AMD64 WinXP SP2 laptop has been running with the fan at full tilt almost all of the time.
I normally run plugged into power with music playing so I didn't think much about it, other than noting it being weird.
right now the fan is running at full tilt. and has been for hours. even when the system is 99% idle. the ambient temp is about 70F. the computer is cool to the touch everywhere.
I unplugged my ipod shuffle.
the fan went into halfspeed mode about 5 seconds later.
it's about 2 minutes later and it still hasn't stepped down to lowspeed fan. but even this is an improvement.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
Could you repeat the expiriment running Knoppix and report back to us.
More seriously though, Tom's Hardware should repeat the experiment with a Linux distro that is notebook friendly and has a SMP kernal.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
It actually all makes sense now. The hardware may be finalised and actually be rolling off production lines, but I'm guessing the "prototype" designation actually reflects the software side, with Apple also triggering the same bug and wanting to work with Intel on a workaround.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Given that ACPI barely works on it and is very buggy, therefore most people usually avoid doing anything fancy such as configuring power saving functionalities...