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Vista Runs Hot on Macbook Pro
PetManimal writes "Ken Mingis, Computerworld's Mac editor, has given Vista a spin on his Macbook Pro in order to review and compare hardware performance with OS X. It's not a rigorous benchmarking, but he does notice a few issues relating to power consumption: 'Since installing Vista, I have found that my MacBook Pro runs hot. No doubt Microsoft hasn't worked on power management issues that might affect Apple hardware, which leaves me to wonder whether I'm slowly cooking the motherboard of my laptop. It's not hot enough to fry an egg on the aluminum case, but my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced. Once again, energy management for Apple hardware is not likely at the top of Microsoft's list. Once Apple writes updated drivers to work with Vista, I'd expect these issues to be addressed.'"
1. Vista runs hot on MacBook Pro because he's using a beta OS without hardware drivers, using a mechanism for running it that itself is still beta. (And uh, I got news for you: everything "runs hot" on MacBook Pro.
But:
2. Apple doesn't support Vista on MacBook Pro and doesn't make Vista drivers for Apple hardware, but probably will after Vista and Boot Camp are both, you know, actually shipping, supported products.
Seems like the submitter managed to leave out quite a few things from the article, like the fact that the subtitle is:
Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio
...and pretty much the entire rest of the article, which is downright positive, and managed to only come up with "Vista runs hot on Macbook (sic) Pro", something only mentioned in a couple of sentences on page 3 of the article.
The author makes claims that while using an unsupported, beta OS on hardware for which driver profiles don't exist in conjunction with another beta, unsupported product (Boot Camp), he wonders whether he's "slowly cooking the motherboard", even given the hardware safeties built in, and then goes on to say that he expects these to be fixed when Apple releases drivers for their hardware that actually work with Vista, and Vista is no longer, oh, I don't know, a beta product, and not even out yet?
So, why does the entire submission revolve around the ONE item that likely won't be news, and indeed will be completely moot, by the time Vista ships and Apple actually supports Boot Camp as a product (when Leopard ships)?
Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers. They probably will do so once Vista is officially released. It's not really worthy of a news posting; maybe as a footnote in a larger review of Vista itself.
Any flavour of windows seems to run hot on a macbook. .. minerals, there's no way you could bear to use one as a true 'laptop' whilst running windows, of any flavour.
From what I've seen - unless you've got your minerals made out of
windows 2000 even always ran hotter than any other OS on my laptops, i remember hearing an explanation a long time ago that they ignore the "wait" cycles or somesuch running the cpu harder than intended.
But for now, I'll let other Mac users be the test dummies for using Vista on a Mac. Both Vista and the needed Mac drivers are too undeveloped for me to want to try Vista on my computer yet.
Hello, McFly (or dumb reporter) but Apple's beta Boot Camp software is not designed to run Vista. You have no reasonable expectation that these issues will be addressed since Apple did not make Boot Camp for Vista. I will say it again -- Boot Camp is beta and it is not designed to run Vista, an operating system that itself is beta.
First, why is this even considered news?
Second, last I checked Vista was not complete. If people even bothered to read the release notes for RC1 you would see Microsoft specifically mentions that the power savings functionality is not yet complete.
Third, as was mentioned multiple times by the reviewer, Apple has not released drivers for Vista yet. Since when is this Microsoft's fault?
Windows.* runs hot
Windows runs one or two degrees Celsius hotter on my workstation, (AMD XP-M @ 2.3 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 6600GT) than Linux. {Temperature read off GKrellm in Linux vs nVidia system monitor in Windows.}
My guess was that Windows' System Idle Process was using CPU cycles even when nothing else was but I stopped caring since I spend so little time in Windows anyway.
From the article, highlighted in the introduction:
"my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced."
Come on, that's not even the center point of the article, nor is that anything but subjective, anecdotal observation. Of one. As someone else has said here in the past, even the plural of anecdote is not data. Get a surface temperature thermometer, get some real data. Who knows? Does this guy sense a 3 degree difference as a lot or a 20 degree difference as a lot? Would either of those differences even matter? Did he run Mac OS X under the same conditions as Vista - was the room temperature the same? How about the apps he was running? I could care less about Vista, but, really, folks, how is this newsworthy that some one guy thinks his one laptop runs hotter running Vista the one time he tried it?
And please stop with the Vista posts. We don't need daily updates, thanks though.
I'm running XP in Boot Camp on my Macbook Pro. Battery life is dismal. Heat is outrageous. And if you try to use it like a real laptop, where you close the thing and it suspends, and open it and it resumes, well, you're in for a major disappointment. Half the time the thing goes to sleep, the only way to wake it is by hard rebooting. For some reason, after you shut the thing you hear the USB reconnect sound, and the screen lights up again. While closed. If your commute is very long, you'll arrive home to find a dead laptop battery.
I'm not bitching, I love this thing, and I'm only using XP to run Eve. Unfortunately, that's turned into "most of the time." I'm just suggesting that people remain realistic about Apple's driver support. Their development time is better spent elsewhere.
Everyone I know who has a windows laptop of any form has always found that the battery drains quickly. Granted I don't know too many people who condition their batteries properly or anything of the sort, but it kind of leads me to believe that Windows doesn't do a whole lot with power management over all.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
How is a Sony Vaio MS's best effort?
Wouldnt that be, like, Sony making crappy laptops?
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
"Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio"
So, the Mac he bought a few months ago performs better than a Sony he bough almost a year ago? How is that not expected? You compare two PC laptops of the same age difference and you're going to get the same result.
It's like saying 'Gee, my brand new Mac is faster than the old PC I'm replacing, Macs are so much better'
Bah and humbug.
I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system. If the OS can influence the behavior of such hardware functionality, there should be smart failsafe mechanisms.
Note that even supported operating systems can get wedged, either because of bugs in the OS, or because of driver problems or other hardware issues; you don't want your laptop to go up in flames when your Ethernet card develops a fault and makes the kernel hang.
...considering the hardware is designed and manufactured by *ASUS*? The Asus W2Jb is the non-Apple version of the 17" Macbook Pro (and is superior in my estimation - even sports a built-in TV tuner).
a nguage=en-us
It seems more likely that, since *ASUS* makes and sells these as Windows laptops, they will be quick to support Vista (and possibly already do).
For the latest drivers for the 17" Macbo^H^H^H^H^H Asus W2Jb, check this site:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SL
Select the W2000 series and the W2J model.
Do your homework, fool.
All slashdotters that actually intend on upgrading ANY computer to Windows Vista please,. . . STAND ON YOUR HEAD!!!!
Vista RC1 runs hot on my Dell Inspiron (WITH proper drivers and WITHOUT aero). I would imagine that enabling aero would easily halve battery life on any laptop out there!
THIS OS IS BAD NEWS! There is not a single tangible feature about it that I have liked. Apart from being DRM'd up the wazoo. They took XP, and just shuffled and "context-ified" all of the menus to make it as inefficient as possible for any power user. It is absolutely dumbed down to the point of being insufferable. I mean there are LITERALLY modal error dialogs warning you that another modal error dialog will pop up! (I'm not kidding.. something like "Continuing this action will require you to grant administrator approval (ok cancel)" followed immediately by "Do you wish to grant administrator approval?").
Even simple system tasks are expected to be performed through task oriented wizards that lend no clue as to what is actually happening behind the schenes. (i.e. I want to enable my network connection with a firewall and default to no file sharing. I can't easily get to that menu. I don't know what the correct answer is to vista's question about where I am most likely to use my connection that will yield a firewalled connection without filesharing. I understand that a conf file isn't for everyone, but this is catering to the 3 year olds!)
One of my degrees is in comp sci. I've taken a GUI design theory classes. It took me > 3 minutes to figure out how to add something to the new start menu (right click, create shortcut isn't there... explore (all) user(s) and I don't have permission to write. I can't drag a shortcut in... hmmm)
My intention is to avoid "upgrading" as long as I possibly can. As it stands, in my opinon, Vista is a DOWNGRADE from xp!
Way to sound like a douchebag. Once again, it's MS, not M$. Second of all, he's comparing a Pentium M on the Sony Vaio to the vastly superior Core Duo chip, not to mention that the M is a single core while the Core Duo is, oh, I don't know, a dual core machine. FYI, just to feed your trolling, Vista (Beta 2) managed to run my laptops battery longer than XP did.