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

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.