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

Disgusting Insensitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

from the chink-in-the-armor dept.

Maybe CowboyNeal has been in the living in the basement for too long, but everybody else knows that saying "chink" is very offensive to Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian people.

I know it's an old phrase, but niggardly is a word that most people do not use anymore either because of the racist connotations.

Especially the tech world, where there are many Asian people, this use of the word chink is amazingly insensitive of CowboyNeal.

This greatly offends me as an Asian-American. Slashdot should be ashamed of themselves for this. They wouldn't use the word nigger, or spic, or kike, or honkey would they?

Re:Disgusting Insensitivity

[Lord Kano]

In Randall Kennedy's book "nigger", he describes the story of David Howard. David Howard, a white director of a municipal agency in Washington D.C. was having a meeting with his staff and said that they had to be "niggardly" with the money at their disposal. Obviously, the word has no racial connotations but the public outcry that resulted caused Mr. Howard to resign his position. Mr. Howard, who was an open homosexual, would no doubt have been offended if people had made comments about going to the smoking area to "smoke a fag", even though in this context there is no intent to be offensive.

The previous poster was right, the words Niggardly and Niggling have fallen out of common use because of their similarity to "The N word".

LK

A bug? Mircosoft?

[Skiron]

Bugger me...

Not Intel bashing at all.

[CyricZ]

How exactly is it "Intel bashing" to point out that similar systems from other manufacturers do not suffer from the same problem? Indeed, following such a faulty train of thought one could easily argue that pointing out the higher stability of Linux relative to Windows 98 is "Microsoft bashing". It obviously isn't "bashing" in any way, but merely pointing out that one manufacturer's product is deficient when compared to another product from another set of developers.

AMD does have dual core chips available, and from another comment in this topic they reportedly work fine. So indeed, this may very well not be a problem with just the Windows XP driver, but may also be a problem with th Intel chips.

Regardless, we can't use faulty systems like these in production settings, regardless of who manufactures them. Even if it is just a problem with Microsoft's driver, I can't recommend this hardware to clients who do wish to use Windows, just because they will run into problems. So I'll just continue to recommend AMD-, PPC- and SPARC-based systems, which often just work.

Re:Comon..

[Overly Critical Guy]

So once again we have a chance to bash Intel, perfect!

You'll continue to see this throughout the year as Intel pulls further ahead of AMD. Their laptop Core Duo chip already competes with AMD's high-end desktop chips while consuming WAY less power, and AMD is a year behind in both 65nm and 45nm processes. So expect a lot more AMD fanboys on Slashdot to make back-handed insults at Intel despite that company having the superior future roadmap in 2006, because for some reason, everyone on Slashdot has a never-ending hard-on for AMD.