Vista Eating Battery Life

LWATCDR writes "It looks like more issues with Vista drains notebook batteries. Using the Aero interface really eats into your notebooks battery life. Of course one of the new 'features' of Vista is supposed to be better power management. This provides a great opportunity for a showdown. How long until someone loads Vista on a MacBook and compares run time? It would provide a flat playing field now that Apple makes Intel-powered notebooks."

Comments

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

processor intensive process uses more energy. turn it off. duh.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I have something to report - Vista virtually sodomized me. Call the Belgian police! Help!!

Re:Hmmm

[ACS Solver]

The really funny part is how Aero, which is so resource-intensive (and apparently battery-intensive as well) jhas been the main marketing point for Vista.

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

The more stuff you have running, the shorter the battery life. I am paranoid, perhaps a side-effect of decades in security, and I am not interested in glitz. The first thing I always did with Vista was to turn off Glass and go into advanced security settings and optimize for performance. I then turned off the Vista sidebar. Battery life under such conditions is better than XP.

I am now running LongHorn Server Beta 3 on my notebook, running as a standard user. Glass and Sidebar are not even available, and my battery life seems to have gone up significantly, I assume because fewer processes are running. IE is hardened on server and it is certainly more secure. And yes, I have enabled the wireless functionality and search indexer. My desktop does look much like Win 2K.

Security tends to go up as you run less functionality. It appears that battery life does so as well.

Re:Hmmm

[QuietLagoon]

IE is hardened on server

Still wondering why you need a security-challenged web browser on a server, hardened or not.

Re:Hmmm

[ProppaT]

How's that funny? MS has to sell Vista to OEMS and OEMS want more ways to force you to upgrade your hardware...and everytime the general populous upgrades their hardware, they're forced into buying a new copy of Windows. It's mutually beneficial to both MS and the hardware industry to advertise this out the wazoo!

Re:Hmmm

[Twanfox]

A Terminal Server, where users use thin clients and run programs off the server? Hmmm.

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

Actually, if you configure it for security, IE7 is probably less security challenged at this point than Firefox or Opera. The low rights / protected mode does add some additional barriers to exploits.

I would note that locked down as it its, it does break a lot of web sites. Paranoid as I am, I typically have explicit distrust keys for Flash and I disable all multimedia to avoid parser errors.

Re:Hmmm

[Jugalator]

Well, it's part because the power consumption is due to graphics card load, which won't slow down the OS in general, so it's mainly a problem for laptops. But I thought these were already intended to use the "regular" Aero interface, and not Glass.

Re:Hmmm

[Jugalator]

All primary web browsers are security challenged. Or do you intend to dispute various security issues in e.g. Firefox in the past, just to pick the main OSS browser? I really haven't seen *that* many exploits for IE 7 yet.

Re:Hmmm

[zakezuke]

processor intensive process uses more energy. turn it off. duh. When I was a kid, I didn't understand that the air conditioner in a car requires more engery, and operating it requires more fuel. In fact, some adults don't understand this.

Processor intensive tasks using more engery is something an average user does not understand.

Though this is the first time I have heard the aero interface uses more engery, it would not shock me if it does. If so it would be yet another case that Microsoft technicaly had a good idea with very poor execution, and ignoring larger existing issues... like for example on a laptop the annoying tendancy of loading unnessicary .dlls cluttering up physical memory making it nessicary to swap to disk, something that should be avoided on a laptop.

Re:Hmmm

[pintpusher]

on a laptop??

Re:Hmmm

[CastrTroy]

Couldn't you just do the same for Firefox under windows or linux. Set up a user account with virtually no rights and run firefox as that user. I'm sure it would work great on linux. Not sure how well it would work on linux, but I'm sure it could be done.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

there was nothing virtual about that

Re:Hmmm

[Ash-Fox]

IE is hardened on server and it is certainly more secure.

...How do you stand the constant popup dialogs telling you that the site may not display properly and the majority of websites just simply not working?

Then you try to download another browser to get out of this insanity and you're constantly getting the bloody popup to add the site to a trusted list. Which doesn't work because each time you click the link you get another random mirror!

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

You could do it that way, but it would be rather inconvenient. I suspect that you would have an easier time using a chroot jail to confine your browser. It has about the same impact. The protected mode involves an integrity label that is set to low. The browser, running at low, is not allowe to directly modify normal files (which are implicitly medium, system files are labeled high). Many of the vulnerabilities in Windows come from the fact that normal users are running with admin privledges. Unfortunately, much software is written assuming such privledges. If you are not running with administrator privledges, compromises of a user account or application are less likely to compromise the system, irregardless of the OS you are running under, be it Windows or *nix.

Re:Hmmm

[ACS Solver]

It's funny because that's probably the least functional new part of Vista. I know you don't advertise an improved driver model or TCP stack to average people, but when the main advertising point is something of a purely aesthetic value and resource-consuming... *cringe*

Re:Hmmm

[aichpvee]

And this is all great until some stupid error on microsoft's part allows an exploit that circumvents the "protected mode" and then you're just as screwed as if it weren't there in the first place. As history has shown, this WILL occur with windows.

All of these restrictions aren't going to help, they're just going to annoy the user even more before the system gets hosed anyway.

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

If I don't trust the site with my credit card number or grant it the ability to update my software (such as Windows Update), capabilities that are security equivalent, it doesn't go into my trusted site list. Given that in general, I don't run scripting, multimedia, and the like, much of the web doesn't work. I simply accept that.

For untrusted browsing or simply going out and getting a file from sites that are not in my trusted site list, I use another browser. Currently it is Opera with everything turned off. No images, plugins, scripting, etc. Cache and cookies flushed on exit. In effect, a close to text more static renderer (opera is better supported than Lynx). If works fine for file acquisition and can easily handle the NYTimes. Even nicer, there are no adds. I start up clean when I go and get a file.

By using server, I have truly broken media on my system. There is no audio support and I don't have media player. I don't care.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

When you were a kid, did they also constantly misspell "energy?"

Re:Hmmm

[ProppaT]

Wait, Vista was supposed to be about functionality...?

Seriously...if features sold O/S's, we'd all be using Linux. The hilarious part of it all is that MS overhauled Window's GUI to be more competitive with OSX, an operating system that market's itself around it's built in features and pulls a lot of it's functionality from Linux, and operating system that's problem is it's horrid GUI that is constantly revamping itself to compete with Windows... ...and the vicious cycle continues...

Re:Hmmm

[ElmoGonzo]

What an idea! Buy the latest version and then disable its new features! I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't come up with that one.

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

There are vulnerabilites in all OS implementations. It will prove possible to circumvent LR IE. Some of approaches were discussed at the CanSecWest conference last month. Similarily, methods of compromising VM's were discussed. Nothing is foolproof. My claim was that the protected mode added a barrier, not that it was insurmountable. If you want to protect yourself better in *nix, you should consider using a chroot jail to confine your browser of choice and its snap-ins.

The assumption that Microsoft products are always insecure is not justified. Microsoft consumer products are feature loaded and are optimized for rich usage models. Consequentially, they have far larger attack surface than if they were minimally configured. We see the same thing hapening in the *nix releases. Ubuntu and SUSE are far larger than *nix releases of 5 years ago. Compare them and their requirements to the current BSD releases, which are far more economical. Field experience with Windows 2K3 servers has shown them to be quite secure and very reliable. I believe that this will continue to the be the case with LongHorn server, which I have been running on and off for 2 years now, from early pre-beta releases. Unlike the early builds of Vista, LongHorn server has been robust and reliable. Vista accomplished this by RTM, but LHS has always been solid in my experience.

Re:Hmmm

[e2d2]

Why would it be assumed that it's poor execution? Is there some open source guru out there that can do better? if so how?

See all that is rhetorical because it's based on an assumption that the implementation is incorrect, yet I've never met a developer that can add glitz to an OS desktop without consuming more resources so I see no reason for such assumption.

As for "better power management", that means the power settings configured by the end users. IE Do you want it to hibernate under certain conditions, etc. These can now be setup across networks by admins to shut down or hibernate/sleep all machines during off hours, such as on weekends. It also means notifications to running software of an impending shutdown or sleep state. Those new features are all related to management of the machine by the user. It has nothing to do with the OS using more or less power in any particular state.

Sorry guys, but this is just another "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to bash MS" story. If there is a legit grievance then hell I'll chip in, but this doesn't exactly get me up in arms hearing that *shocker* more GUI effects = more resource usage. That's common sense.

Re:Hmmm

[kestasjk]

Apple and Linux are all going in this direction; making the desktop look nicer but requiring better hardware. I don't think Apple or Novell are especially interested in making things better for hardware suppliers, they just want to woo more users.

Aero is a stunning interface, incidentally. It's way ahead of XP's Fisher-Price look, is much nicer than any Linux theme I've seen, and arguably looks better than Aqua too. You can tell MS said "Apple's interface looks nice, so lets spend 10x as much money and see if we can get it looking nicer".

Re:Hmmm

[skiflyer]

What I'd like is a way to do this in power manager.. I really like Aero and the other glitz... but I'd like it turn off at x% remaining battery if it's going to cost me battery time. Personally I'm running it on a brand new laptop so I have no comparison, and I'm far too lazy to make all the adjustments and see if it changes.

Re:Hmmm

[secPM_MS]

Reasonable idea. I hope somebody from power management reads slashdot. I have no idea who to forward it on to.

Re:Hmmm

[Jherek Carnelian]

When I was a kid, I didn't understand that the air conditioner in a car requires more engery, and operating it requires more fuel. In fact, some adults don't understand this.

More energy than what?

Typically driving at more than 40mph with your windows rolled down will consume more energy than driving at the equivalent speed with the windows rolled up and the A/C on.

It is important to understand here that people don't just turn the A/C on to be able to say that the A/C is on, they do it to achieve the result of cooling down the passengers. In the case of driving at least 40mph the A/C will use less energy than the alternatives.

Though this is the first time I have heard the aero interface uses more engery, it would not shock me if it does. If so it would be yet another case that Microsoft technicaly had a good idea with very poor execution, and ignoring larger existing issues...

If you believe that Aero and the rest of Vista improve productivity - which is certainly something that MS claims then perhaps the extra energy that they consume is being more effectively used to acheive the end result of getting work done.

If I were an MS apologist I might even make the claim that the reduced battery life is not a problem because all the new improvements in Vista mean you save even more time than the battery life is reduced by.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

you have an answer for everything.

sounds like bullshit to me.

you've basically said "I have an easy way to make IE useless, but secure"

to that I respond: "I have a slightly more difficult way to make Firefox useless, and even more secure"

Be that as it may, I prefer to run firefox in a useful fashion with decent security.

Thank you for pointing out an utterly useless exercise.

Re:Hmmm

[timeOday]

Personally I'm quite surprised that Aero noticeably drains the battery. I haven't used it, but it's just animations for things like window resizing, isn't it? A half-second of animation now and then.

This also makes me wonder, does OSX have a "no-animation" option to maximize battery life? How about Gnome and KDE?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you configure it for security, IE7 is probably less security challenged at this point than Firefox or Opera. The low rights / protected mode does add some additional barriers to exploits.

I would note that locked down as it its, it does break a lot of web sites. Paranoid as I am, I typically have explicit distrust keys for Flash and I disable all multimedia to avoid parser errors.

You can do that with firefox as well, or install the noscripts plugin.
Additionally, you can opt not to install flash, shockwave, java.

But the easiest way is probably just to unplug your ethernet cable and be your own island.
100% security, provided you have no wireless or bluetooth adaptor.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Vista, and if I set the power policy to 'Power saver', it automatically turns off the 'glass' effect when I go from mains to battery power. So, you don't even have to turn it off, just choose the 'Power saver' policy and it will be done automatically.

Re:Hmmm

[N3Roaster]

You're right that this will happen with Windows, but this is a potential problem with many other operating systems as well. Processes can break out of chroot jails in many implementations. Additional user annoyance is a separate probelem. The way to stop the user annoyance is to get application developers to stop writing code that assumes more privliges than it ought to need.

Re:Hmmm

[JonathanBoyd]

The hilarious part of it all is that MS overhauled Window's GUI to be more competitive with OSX, an operating system that market's itself around it's built in features and pulls a lot of it's functionality from Linux

It pulls a lot more from Mac OS 9, NEXT Step and BSD than Linux.

Re:Hmmm

[darkshadow]

You're making me engery. You wouldn't like me when I'm engery.

Re:Hmmm

[Overly Critical Guy]

Then why do I get great battery life running Aqua on OS X even on an older machine? Nothing about Aero looks better than Aqua, so what is it about Aero? The usual shitty Microsoft programming?

On an unrelated note, it's going to be amusing when OS X Leopard comes out with its unified interface and Windows ends up being the most toy-like in appearance while OS X looks the most clean and professional.

Re:Hmmm

[The Warlock]

is much nicer than any Linux theme I've seen

Taken a look at Beryl recently? It's quite stable now.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

True enough. I'm running Vista on my laptop, and everyone is stunned by the appearance. Quite a few people have also said it looks like a Mac, which it does in a way, with the gadgets having a passing resemblence to the OS X dock (even though they're actually not the same thing at all), but looking better overall. It doesn't have as much of a 'toy' look as XP or OS X.

There are a lot of technical improvements under the bonnet that I appreciate, but most users wouldn't even notice, including the new driver model, the privilege elevation mechanism (User Account Control) and Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) to name a few. UAC isn't that big a deal for me, because most of it could already be done on XP by running as a normal user and using 'Run As' to run things with elevated privileges, but the way Vista does it is less of a hassle, and is accessible to users who aren't as technically inclined.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable terminal server???

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would it be assumed that it's poor execution? Is there some open source guru out there that can do better? if so how?

GUI effects = more resource usage. That's common sense.
Not necessarily if you move some work to the GPU you are effectively removing some load from the CPU. If we assume that GPU is much more efficient in its task than CPU is in drawing the desktop then it means that we will be doing the same work with less energy. The desktop-effects are a bonus in this model.

Re:Hmmm

[Bert64]

You can chroot it under linux too, if running inside a minimal chroot and under a limited userid, there's very little you could do even if you compromised it.

Re:Hmmm

[nanosquid]

Actually, you can just run it under AppArmor, which gives you more security than a separate account with less hassle.

Re:Hmmm

[Ramble]

While Beryl is nice and has some good customisability, Aero is just a more polished look (sometimes I do prefer Beryl since I can turn all the shit off).

Re:Hmmm

[jcr]

Well, after Longhorn cratered, the skins were all they had left to tout.

-jcr

Re:Hmmm

[cheater512]

Apple and Linux are all going in this direction; making the desktop look nicer but requiring better hardware. The difference is that Linux is going from requiring a 286 to a 486 while Windows is going from a Pentium 3 to a Dual Core Pentium 4.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you mispell 'energy' three times in one post?

Re:Hmmm

[bobcat7677]

I ran windows 2000 server on my previous laptop for a long time. The only down side was that it didn't hibernate. Other then that it was a great dev environment and ran great.

Re:Hmmm

[kestasjk]

Don't kid yourself. The requirements between a Linux box and a Windows box that can do the same things is very small. Linux never even ran on a 286..

Re:Hmmm

[ozmanjusri]

I've never met a developer that can add glitz to an OS desktop without consuming more resources so I see no reason for such assumption.

e2d2, meet Rasterman. http://www.enlightenment.org/

Sorry guys, but this is just another "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to bash MS" story.

Your post is yet another pointless "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to promote MS" posting.

Re:Hmmm

[sqrt(2)]

Having just spent the better half of a night getting Beryl to run on my brand new Feisty install (On an AMD64 notebook, an Acer Aspire 5100), I'm going to have to disagree. It's also responsible for turning what is otherwise the most rock solid OS I've ever installed into the most buggy, temperamental, crash-happy OS since the horrid days of WindowsME.

When it DOES work it looks absolutely beautiful, and completely blows away anything that Windows or OSX has to offer. Is it going to stay on my machine? No, it's not, but It's a project I'm going to keep a very close eye on. OSS developers are just as capable as the proprietary vendors in creating useless eye candy, I've probably spent 20 minutes rotating that cube.

I dual boot with Feisty and Vista (ultimate) and the battery problem IS real. Ubuntu gets about a half hour of extra battery life on this laptop than when I boot into Vista (even with Vista in feature cutting power saving mode, although I'm not using Beryl for the Ubuntu comparison, I'm not sure what things would look like with all the eye candy turned on.)

Re:Hmmm

[dhasenan]

My god, Microsoft made an option for their displays that takes more processing power, and using it drains your battery quicker! Such a feat of poor engineering!

Re:Hmmm

[zakezuke]

Why would it be assumed that it's poor execution? Is there some open source guru out there that can do better? if so how? Why is it it's assumed I meant poor program code when I said "execution". Microsoft has good ideas... but what you do with the ideas is what's important. There seems to be a lack of any real system analysis, and little or no coordination between departments. A consistent menu bar is a good sign of this... to alter the program settings does one edit options, or tools options. For a time, there didn't seem to be a standard design template. When asking the developers on the subject they would say "it's a vendor issue" when the 'vendor' was Microsoft. Another issue is works->word compatibility. You would think upgrading to the premium product you could take an old spreadsheet and import it to the superior product.

If you want a real vista complaint... a minor example. I just tried to ftp to my home server and it seems I need to run an instance of file explorer rather than internet explorer. One the one hand, it's good they made these more separate. On the other, it adds keystrokes to an ordinary task.

The problem I have with Microsoft isn't usually the 'code', but rather a lack of any real standards and practices. It's a young field, and even younger company.

A good idea but poor execution is vista. An improved alt-tab / alt-win is one case of a good idea. But using more resources is a side effect which would could affect how many battery hours one can get on a laptop yet not making it clear using them would reduce battery life.

Sorry guys, but this is just another "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to bash MS" story. If there is a legit grievance then hell I'll chip in, but this doesn't exactly get me up in arms hearing that *shocker* more GUI effects = more resource usage. That's common sense. Only IF you understand the basics of how a computer works. Anyhow my "grievance" isn't so much that the fancy new interface sucks, but rather with people who understands the very basics of computers not understanding that average users do not. It's not common at all to know this, it's rather esoteric. In fact, if I were to believe the press statements using more graphics effects but using the GPU results in lower power consumption.

I agree this story is sort of anti-MS, and Slashdot is filled with open source zealots who are the first to chime in and say "ms sucks use the penguin". I do use Linux but I also use Windows. I love Microsoft word, and Excel. I tried Open Office for a good long while but gave up the moment people tossed me password encrypted documents. Frontpage is also a really decent product. I'm not one of those people who would say open source could do it better. I'm one of those people who believes Microsoft would do much better hiring more people who have big business experience, can co-ordinate between department, actually use One-Note at meetings and document the direction they were going, and actually use a white board.

Re:Hmmm

[zakezuke]

If you believe that Aero and the rest of Vista improve productivity - which is certainly something that MS claims then perhaps the extra energy that they consume is being more effectively used to acheive the end result of getting work done.

If I were an MS apologist I might even make the claim that the reduced battery life is not a problem because all the new improvements in Vista mean you save even more time than the battery life is reduced by. My experience base with vista is limited. I have to agree the search feature in the start menu is nice for keyboard users. That might increase productivity depending on the length you have to type for a given program you have to open. But it seems you have to enable the Aero theme to get there. I can't however see that feature saving me so much time to justify less battery life if this indeed is a result of running Aero. A drawback of vista is I can't paste files into explorer's ftp, I must open up a file explorer. This is likely a good idea but it does mean extra keystrokes, rather than the old "run"-ftp://site.foo.

More energy than what?

Typically driving at more than 40mph with your windows rolled down will consume more energy than driving at the equivalent speed with the windows rolled up and the A/C on.

It is important to understand here that people don't just turn the A/C on to be able to say that the A/C is on, they do it to achieve the result of cooling down the passengers. In the case of driving at least 40mph the A/C will use less energy than the alternatives. Having the AC on, at 40mph, engages the clutch and puts more load on the engine and results in high fuel consumption than not having the AC on. I think you put more credit than people deserve. Thoughtful people roll down the windows, let the car cool, then if too hot hit the AC. Thoughtless people just leave the AC on... many I've observed in winter months the AC switch is sometimes left on. Handy feature if one is trying to defrost the windows and desires to dehumidify the air first, but easy to forget if you have your heater on. I don't have AC so I can't say I forgot about it.

People in general don't understand the very basics as to how technology works.

Re:Hmmm

[adolf]

True. But a modern GPU* uses more energy when it is performing work than when it is not, just like a modern CPU.

I mean: Just because it's offloaded from the CPU does not mean that it is free*. The ATI X300 in my laptop sure does make a lot more heat, and accordingly uses a lot more energy, when running 3D OpenGL applications than when sitting at a text-mode prompt, at any given clock speed.

But it probably doesn't matter much. I note an increase in battery life on my Inspiron 6000d of about 25% by running Vista (complete with Aero) instead of XP, with very similar power management settings To me, this has meant the difference between occasionally needing to plug the computer in on a client site, and never needing to (so far, anyway).

I could kill Aero and get some more life out of it, but I like the pretties. :)

[*]: Obvious, glaring exceptions like 3dfx's earlier lines of Voodoo card do exist. The Voodoo3 2000, for example, is known to run blisteringly hot ALL THE TIME, whether or not it has anything productive to do. But hardware of this ilk isn't going to be used with Vista, anyway.

Re:Hmmm

[shaitand]

'that's problem is it's horrid GUI that is constantly revamping itself to compete with Windows'

Apparently you aren't looking at the same GUI I am. I have beryl loaded on the latest Ubuntu and the GUI certainly blows away anything I saw on Vista or MacOS. Not just in function but its much prettier and the effects are much cooler. Somehow, it actually manages to use those cool effects in a functional way.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'd like it turn off at x% remaining battery if it's going to cost me battery time.

Vista does actaully listen to your battery settings. When I need to be disconnected or power for an extended period of time I will flick my machine into Power Saver mode. This slows the CPU, dims the screen and actually disables the Alpha blending in glass (which is one of the places where all the CPU cycles are eaten).

The nice thing about it is when you leave it in Power Saver, and then plug in, all the higher end features come back - unplug, and they turn off.

My recommendation? Put it into Power Saver, and if you need more grunt while you are on battery just up it to Balanced or High Performance whilst you need it.

I get very good battery life this way out of a 9-month old battery.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any of you tried the Windows DreamScene Preview? With it you can select a video for your desktop just like having a stationary picture. This brings whole new levels to multitasking! See, I can watch my porn in HD in the background through semi transparent applications while I work! It's simply genius. Who would have ever thought to put a video as your desktop. It's the coolest thing, everybody I know is doing it. Who cares about batteries when you have porn 24/7 always in view!!!!

Oh and no it doesn't bother me that my processor hangs at 50+% all the time, I carry 5 spare batteries at all times. That's what dual-core processors are for anyway right?

Re:Hmmm

[drsmithy]

Your post is yet another pointless "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to promote MS" posting.

It's not, because it's not promoting Microsoft.

Yours, however, is clearly just another "if it's not criticising Microsoft, it's astroturf" post.

Re:Hmmm

[SirTalon42]

Let me guess, you have an ATI video card?

Re:Hmmm

[sqrt(2)]

Bingo. And yes, I know about the driver situation, do you think the average end user will accept that as an excuse?

Re:Hmmm

[smoker2]

Microsoft consumer products are feature loaded and are optimized for rich usage models.... quite secure and very reliable .... LongHorn server has been robust and reliable.
Hmmm, smells like MS trolling to me.

Re:Hmmm

[zakezuke]

How can you mispell 'energy' three times in one post? 1) I didn't employ preview
2) coffee in my keyboard and fast typing, as well as sweetned green tea
3) The post in queston was bought to you by Vicodin and Valium, thanks to an auto accident I would seem to have compression of the ulnar nerve at some point between shoulder and hand. As the left hand is unaffected, I can not deny my proprioception is affected.
4) I am most excelent at reproducing typos.

I imagine I will be modded down for this offtopic post, but hey, your question is legit enough to justify a responce.

Re:Hmmm

[Targon]

In general, Linux has generally had i386 as the base, though you do have some distributions that are Pentium or above, or AMD64(including Intel's clone with a new name). Windows XP really was never intended for anything below the level of a Pentium 3, and in general, running on anything less than a 1GHz Pentium 3(1.5GHz Pentium 4) wouldn't be a good idea.

The real key when it comes to requirements are that if your machine came with an older version of Windows, you shouldn't upgrade since you don't get much of an improvement on older hardware. Think about it, if an old machine came with Windows 98 on it, then going to ME or XP would be a bad idea. If your machine came with XP and you got it more than a year before Vista was released, then chances are you should NOT try to put Vista on it. With each generation of any GUI, the graphical demands will be higher. Intel graphics have always been substandard, so with the higher graphics requirements of the new UI in Vista, you just don't want to put Vista on a machine with Intel graphics.

For Linux, you have a LOT of choices when it comes to the UI, including not being forced to use a GUI at all. If you don't need graphics on the machine for what the machine is being used for, then you won't need as much CPU or GPU power(since the graphics DO require some CPU cycles).

In addition to this, as time goes on, the cost for higher performance goes down. So while the new operating systems may require more processing power to run well, the processing power available in your average computer will be there. The end result is that new machines with the latest operating systems run around the same as the older machines did with the latest OS available at that time. This does NOT take into account people with Intel based graphics, which really can't handle the "better graphics" required by newer operating systems. Even in the old days, if you had one machine with an Oak VGA card, it wouldn't perform as well as one with a Tseng Labs based card in it, but back then, people as a general rule didn't know that you could upgrade the video card to get better performance.

As a final note, Vista will run a bit better if you disable Aero Glass.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you have a spare moment you crawl under a rock?

Live!

Re:Hmmm

[e2d2]

Why on earth would you say I was "promoting" Microsoft? That kind of statement makes your post null and void.

Besides, your statement is ludicrous, that somehow enlightenment could use "less resources". Than what? XP? Vista? KDE? win 3.1?

I don't see a damn thing mentioned on the website about low power usage so as far as I'm concerned you are talking out of your ass. But I could be wrong. Prove me wrong with more than some open ended "you're an apologist" bullshit and some real facts and then I'll take notice.

Punk ass little bitch, talking shit from afar making assumptions about others and himself. How many GPLd projects do you have under your belt? I'd bet a big goose egg 0 and you're just a fan boy.

Re:Hmmm

[Laur]

Having the AC on, at 40mph, engages the clutch and puts more load on the engine and results in high fuel consumption than not having the AC on.

The parent's point was that rolling down the windows drastically reduces the aerodynamics of the vehicle, causing the engine to use more gas to push the car forward. Over a certain speed (the parent said 40 mph, I haven't bothered to check his number), the aerodynamic losses outweigh the A/C load increase, and it is more efficient to just use the A/C.

Re:Hmmm

[renegadesx]

Oh you were comming on to Vista and you know it

The last time....

[SQLGuru]

The last time someone posted a question about "How long", it was answered in the first post.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac, or I'd do it. But maybe this counts: http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/reviews/index.cfm?re viewid=2215

Layne

Re:The last time....

[dal20402]

At least last time I tried to run Vista on my MBP, part of the problem was Apple drivers that weren't optimized for power saving. The processor ran at full speed all the time (where on OS X it used SpeedStep) and the HD would never spin down. Thus I don't know how much of the fault is Microsoft's and how much is Apple's.

With that in mind, I got about 60% the battery life from Vista that I got from OS X.

Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?

Re:The last time....

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?

Because OS X has "Teh Snappy" (patent pending).

Re:The last time....

[n2art2]

Boy good thing I named mine. . . . "The Snappy"

I wouldn't want a patent fight with Apple.

Re:The last time....

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?

i'm no programmer, but the fact that Aqua renders nicely on my ancient G4 tower whilst Aero requires a box on steroids probably points to the underlying issue.

Re:The last time....

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention it runs fine on a G3 with a 32mb video card. Try running aero on something equivalent to THAT!

Re:The last time....

[aarku]

The blurry glass effect in Aero alone is actually really expensive. (And stupid) There is no analog on Mac OS X.

Re:The last time....

[soft_guy]

I suspect that both Aqua and Vista are offloading most of the work for the fancy graphics to the GPU.

Re:The last time....

[Randolpho]

... which has very few power consumption reduction features.

Re:The last time....

[MMC Monster]

While I am sure that both Aero and Aqua are using the GPU for rendering effects, why does Vista need such a high-powered video card compared to the video cards that Macs come with (people post that Aqua has reasonable performance on G4 macs, which aren't what you can call the latest hardware).

Re:The last time....

[R3d M3rcury]

The blurry glass effect in Aero alone is actually really expensive. (And stupid) Uh, there is no blurry glass effect in Aero. It's time to clean your monitor.

(I don't know if Aero has a blurry glass effect. I've never used Vista and I've only seen it once or twice. I'm just trying to be funny.)

Re:The last time....

[ceoyoyo]

Reasonable? When Aqua and Quartz Extreme came out that's all there was. You had to have a fairly new Mac though, one with a video card that could execute shader programs.

Re:The last time....

[dal20402]

One thing that may explain part of the difference is that, especially in more recent OS X revisions, the OS has been very smart about which features of Aqua it enables and disables. On slower systems (lacking either GPU or CPU power) it may turn off some of the shadowing effects, some of the animations, the translucent menus/dialogs, and especially Core Image effects like Expose animation or Dashboard ripples.

At least by default, Aero may not be that smart. (I plead ignorance here, though -- I've only ever used Vista on extremely capable machines and I've never dug into it to see if it's as configurable for performance as, say, Luna on WinXP.)

Re:The last time....

[drsmithy]

i'm no programmer, but the fact that Aqua renders nicely on my ancient G4 tower whilst Aero requires a box on steroids probably points to the underlying issue.

Firstly, if you find OS X "nice" on a G4 (personally, I don't), you will find Vista equally as "nice" on equivalent hardware.

Secondly, Vista doesn't need anything close to "a box on steriods" to run. It is quite usable on ~1Ghz P3 class machines with 1G RAM and a $30 video card. To clarify, that's a PC dating from roughly 2001.

Vista and OS X need roughly the same hardware to do roughly the same thing and deliver roughly the same performance on roughly the same hardware (personally I find Vista to be quicker, but I've been complaining about OS X's poor UI responsiveness since it existed).

The simple fact is an entry-level $500 PC can run Vista quite nicely. At least as well as an entry level Mac can run OS X. Further, this situation does not change as you compare equivalent hardware from different times over the last ~7 years or so.

Short version: Vista's hardware requirements are not unreasonable - and criticism thereof is both little more than FUD, and mostly irrelevant.

Re:The last time....

[kristjansson]

I think the point he's trying to make is that you get full eye-candy on a 32Mb ATI or NVidia card on the mac, and you need a 256Mb DX9 compliant card to get full eye-candy under vista...

Re:The last time....

[drsmithy]

While I am sure that both Aero and Aqua are using the GPU for rendering effects, why does Vista need such a high-powered video card compared to the video cards that Macs come with [...]

It doesn't. You need a DX9-capable video card. They debuted ca. 2003-2004 and can be bought new for ca. US$30. These days, they're not even *close* to be "high-powered".

To actually get all the Aqua features (eg: that nice ripple effect when dropping a Dashboard Widget) you also need an equivalent card in your Mac. The difference is OS X can fallback to a software renderer while Vista doesn't have one. Why doesn't Vista have a software renderer ? Because developing one, given the context of the systems Vista will mostly be running on (new, or relatively powerful enthusiast machines), would be a stupid and pointless waste of time and money. That argument does (more accurately, did) not apply to OS X, because OS X has been around since there wasn't sufficient consumer-level 3D hardware to do any acceleration - ie: it debuted with a software renderer.

[...] (people post that Aqua has reasonable performance on G4 macs, which aren't what you can call the latest hardware).

Anyone who considers OS X performance on a G4 "reasonable", will (or should, if they're being honest and not picking out specific corner cases) find Vista's performance *at least* similarly "reasonable" on equivalent hardware (ie: P3s and low-end P4s). Personally I find OS X annoyingly unresponsive on anything less than a G5 based machine, and even my mum's G5 iMac stumbles more often than I like.

The short version is that Vista and OS X have basically equivalent hardware requirements to deliver basically equivalent performance and features. Like most criticisms of Vista, the "it needs monstrous hardware" is nothing more than FUD.

(The "slowest" machine I've used Vista on that could actually handle Aero was a 900Mhz P3 with a GeForce 5600 and a gig of RAM. This PC dates from around the beginning of 2001, with the exception of the video card, which I bought second hand around the beginning of 2005. It runs Vista *at least* as well as my Mum's G5 iMac runs OS X (although these days I typically only use it for running old DOS and Windows 95 games, since it's the only machine I still have with an ISA slot that can drive my AWE64).)

Re:The last time....

[drsmithy]

I think the point he's trying to make is that you get full eye-candy on a 32Mb ATI or NVidia card on the mac, and you need a 256Mb DX9 compliant card to get full eye-candy under vista...

Then his "point" is wrong.

To get "full eye-candy" (meaning the Mac is CoreImage-capable) in OSX requires the same level of GPU hardware support that Aero does in Vista (Geforce 5200, 5600, Radeon 9600XT, 9700, etc - "DirectX9" cards). From memory, the oldest Macs that would have had such a card from the factory were the last of the dual G4s, and it was the highest-end video card option at the time.

Re:The last time....

[SEMW]

Then please explain how it works on my laptop; which has a bog-standard Intel GMA chip that shares some trivially small amount of RAM?

Re:The last time....

[dal20402]

Anyone who considers OS X performance on a G4 "reasonable", will (or should, if they're being honest and not picking out specific corner cases) find Vista's performance *at least* similarly "reasonable" on equivalent hardware (ie: P3s and low-end P4s). Personally I find OS X annoyingly unresponsive on anything less than a G5 based machine, and even my mum's G5 iMac stumbles more often than I like.

My experience is that OS X responsiveness actually has more to do with RAM than processor. I've used an early, slow G4 machine with 2GB of RAM running Tiger, and while "the snappy" is missing everything happens reasonably quickly and the machine is not painful at all to use. By contrast, the 512MB, shared-memory Core Duo iMacs at school (thank you, Mac-clueless IT dept.) are horrendously painful to use, worse than a 256MB XP machine we have in our journal office. I expect your mom's iMac is similarly RAM-limited.

I have no experience with Vista on low-end hardware, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same principle applies, provided Aero's somewhat higher graphics requirements are met.

Re:The last time....

[toddestan]

So? I can get full eye-candy under Windows XP using the integrated Intel graphics on an old PIII system, and full eye-candy in Fluxbox on some 4MB STB card from 1996.

Maybe they aren't all the same thing?

Re:The last time....

[Tokerat]

I am a programmer, and the answer is that if the underlying OS isn't also eating a significant amount of CPU at all times, you'll have the spare cycles to make things look good.

Re:The last time....

[Anonymous Coward]

"On slower systems (lacking either GPU or CPU power) it may turn off some of the shadowing effects ... the translucent menus/dialogs"

Uh... no, it doesn't. Not so far as I'm aware, anyway. True about some animations though (could be a lot more!).

Also, Apple errs in favor of showing eye candy when it might not be smooth or fluid (my Mac mini, for instance, does all the animations like the ripple effect, but there's often a half-second lag before the effect kicks in and a ton of frames at the beginning get dropped...).

Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[TooMuchToDo]

Obligatory Slashdot car analogy:

That's like saying you're expecting great savings from a fuel management system on a V12 Aston Martin.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[jeevesbond]

That's like saying you're expecting great savings from a fuel management system on a V12 Aston Martin.

Shame this Aston Martin runs like it's got the engine of a Lada though.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Larry Lightbulb]

I know the car analogy isn't supposed to make sense, and your comment was funny, but in this case it's true - when you install a new OS it's like buying a new car without an engine and having to use the one from your previous car. So yep, your Aston Martin really does have the engine of a Lada though.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I would assume that a V12 Aston Martin also do not perform sluggishly.

Vista is alike a 1960 WV with guys doing drugs in the back. Forget about gas mileage 'cause you've spent all your money getting high and tasting colours and you ain't go nowhere.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked, Aston Martin's were good cars. It'd be more like expecting excellent mileage out of a Caprice Classic.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[gstoddart]

"That's like saying you're expecting great savings from a fuel management system on a V12 Aston Martin."

Shame this Aston Martin runs like it's got the engine of a Lada though.

Yeah, but it's got a 'Type R' sticker, bright pink plastic hubcabs and windsheild wipers, and an exhaust pipe you can hear from a mile away. However, the alignment is shot, the valves leak, and the windshield is cracked, but it's got all of the bling accessories on it -- so it must be cool.

Maybe it's time to un-pimp the OS. :-P

Cheers

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Jesus_666]

Maybe it's time to un-pimp the OS. :-P

Vee-Dub in da house? Or, as we'd rather need a German-ish coder instead of an engineer, how about "H to the Jail" Reiser?

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Aleast the Aston Martin is burning the gas and hence giving you the performance you expect... the Lada is probably just drippping gas out various orifices...

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Bert64]

That nice big V12 might be powerfull enough to drive a bus...
But what do you think it's fuel economy will be when driving a bus instead of the light weight aston martin body shell?

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[David Gerard]

Trabant-Microsoft automobile unveiled

MUSTELASBURG, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Monday (Neues Deutschland) — Microsoft and Trabant have unveiled a complete new software system for car drivers. The "Sink" platform, introduced at the Mustelasburg auto show, will be available in over 12 Trabant vehicles this year.

The agreement is part of a constant quest by Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, for fresh vistas beyond the office supply market it dominates. Trabant, meanwhile, hopes that new technology will help it solve the problem of dwindling market share even in its home German market. "The market potential is absolutely enormous," said Markus Fields, Trabant's president for the DDR.

Microsoft is bringing its expertise to bear on all aspects of the new Trabant Langeshorn:

• Improved compatibility with the original motor-tricycle version of the Trabant, while maintaining at least its level of crash safety. Not that the Trabant Langeshorn crashes.
• The two cylinders of the two-stroke engine will be doubled in size, shortening the 0 to 100 km/h time to three hours and forty minutes, half what it was in previous models.
• A colouring agent ("Aero") will be added to the exhaust, to accurately recreate the vapour trail of the twenty-first century flying car those people in the West are supposed to have by now.
• The phenolic reinforced plastic body will be doubled in thickness for added crash protection. Not that the Trabant Langeshorn crashes.
• Other "Aero" enhancements in the Trabant Langeshorn include pink alloy wheels, a musical horn playing Die Internationale and a metre-high spoiler.

"The thrust of our new model of car is to make it more attractive to Trabant owners," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. "Any Trabant driver knows Ferrari owners are just losers with penis-size issues and that their market share is insignificant. Ferrari just keeps proving over and over that it can't come out with a popularly priced Trabant-like model."

Microsoft expected its marketing muscle to go far in this new market battle. "Just imagine the joy a Ferrari mechanic will feel when they finally get to work on a market leader with industry muscle behind it like the Trabant."

Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy

[Red Flayer]

Forget about gas mileage 'cause you've spent all your money getting high and tasting colours and you ain't go nowhere.

As long as you have the engine off, in that case the gas mileage will equal infinity if you roll the VW forward a couple feet. I think you've just solved the fuel crisis... instead of burning fossil fuels for transport to another location, we'll burn hallucinogenics for transport to another dimension.

Vista could eat kittens

[pembo13]

and Microsoft's marketing team would still sell it by the bundles.

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[Kythe]

Yep. And you'd have MS fanboys claiming XP ate kittens, too, back when it was introduced.

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[heinousjay]

And you'd have rabid anti-Microsoft people claiming it's not kittens, it's human babies.

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[operagost]

And you'd have losers on Slashdot posting endless non-funny threads about it. Oh wait...

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[Kythe]

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I'll stipulate that Vista only eats kittens.

Innocent, sweet, furry, helpless, adorable kittens.

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[cgreuter]

and Microsoft's marketing team would still sell it by the bundles.

Well, the kittens are really bad for your mouse.

Re:Vista could eat kittens

[Saint V Flux]

If Vista ate kittens, I'd actually buy it. I freaking hate cats!

Vista... sucks?

[kmhebert]

Apparantly so. I have heard lots of complaints about all kinds of aspects of Vista and yet I have yet to see anyone really saying "Wow Vista is GREAT install it NOW you don't know what you're missing!!!" So, well -- why get it? Except when forced to when buying a new, Windows-pre-installed PC?

Re:Vista... sucks?

[bogie]

People like Vista because A) it's new, shiny, and different B) they wasted a crap load of money on the "Ultimate" edition or C) they are foolish enough to believe it is an upgrade over XP. In some ways it is actually an upgrade over XP, in many many others ways right now it is a big step backwards. Face it, people are going to use it no matter how bad it is.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Rycross]

I actually sorta like Vista, but I still tell people not to buy it. Too new, drivers are immature, and too pricey for too little improvement.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran the 30 day trial of Vista Ultimate, and I have to say.... it's not worth it.

I'd like to see Microsoft release the Aero theme for XP as a $25 Plus! pack.
If they did that, as well as release the Vista game pack for XP as a $20 Plus! pack, I'd buy both of those and never give Vista another look. They did a great job on the games and my kids love Purple Place. My wife runs Vista Home Premium on her laptop and likes it, but I've got a free upgrade laying on my desk and don't plan on installing it.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Lazerf4rt]

I like Vista. No, it's not "great". But one thing I like is that the UI is never stuck. You never see "invalid" window regions, you know, when you drag one window across another one that's frozen. (At least not in Aero.) I realize other OS'es worked that way first, though. I also like the new explorer interface. The glass theme is already starting to feel a bit old, but whatever. I'd like to see other effects besides glass. OS X has those cool slurping minimize/restore windows; I wouldn't say no to that.

I still wouldn't recommend anyone else to install it. The main reason to avoid it is backward compatibility. If a home user is currently entrenched in XP, they should wait another couple years. By then, more of their applications/peripherals are more likely to be compatible. Then they'll be fine. But if they're willing to make big changes right now, and not bug me for too much support (because I'm not familiar with it), I'd suggest they try Macs. I probably wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, just because if they were enough of a DIY type they'd probably already have tried it themselves. Anyway, just my gut feelings on the subject.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Rycross]

Actually I like it because it manages to be more responsive on my machine than XP, despite what people say about the performance. UAC is actually a good idea too, despite the panning by Slashdot... its basically sudo. Oh and before you mention it, no I don't find it annoying. I rarely see the popups. Maybe once a week.

And I didn't pay for it either. I got it through MSDN.

But no, its not for everyone. Mine is probably a rare case, and the drivers are immature. Its not a good idea for the average user to switch right now. And its definitely not worth paying for it.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[mrchaotica]

Vista allegedly has much improved support for Tablet PCs, which is enough for me to consider trying it out on my Thinkpad (which came with XP Tablet Edition, but also qualified for the $10 Vista "upgrade"). However, for anything other than a tablet there's no way in Hell I'd consider Vista -- any normal computer ought to run Ubuntu or OS X instead.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Goffee71]

It is very hard to find a good reason to buy, I found one though... There's a little reporting feature tells you how long a crocked program delayed your system shutting down, so now we all know!

Expression 50 seconds
Radeon driver 6 seconds

Nearly a minute of my life wasted when I shut down.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[petard]

And I didn't pay for it either. I got it through MSDN.

Where can one get this free MSDN of which you speak?

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

First this is slashdot where apparantly everyone runs something other than a microsoft-based product. So of course anything is going to suck.
Personally. I like vista, its a nice change from XP. I havn't found anything that wrong with it yet. Everything I have wanted to do so far has worked just fine.
As for it eating battery life, extra features come at an extra price in battery life... also Aqua in OSX quite possibly is better coded, since doesn't it use OGL and Aero uses DX9? From what I can tell D3D9 has to do alot of waiting and stuff where as OGL can pretty much do stuff all the time due to how its coded.
There should be a thing on OGL vs DX10 on wikipedia among other places.
So yeah, don't run aero on a laptop... which i really wouldn't reccomend anyway since most laptops have crappy graphic chips (most of them are intel) anyways... so... spam...

Re:Vista... sucks?

[Rycross]

Through ones place of employment.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[assassinator42]

Through being enrolled in a University and getting large scholarships and grants.

Re:Vista... sucks?

[petard]

bah. That's not free if you own your place of employment :-P

I was hoping you were referring to some promotional program I didn't know about.

AMD64

[Diamond Tree]

I've been trying to figure out for some time whether my battery drains faster in any significant way between Fed Core 6 and XP on an HP nx6325 x86_64 laptop (two partitions). I don't think there's any significant difference. Anyone know otherwise?

From what I've gathered about Vista, that XP would outperform it on battery life doesn't surprise.

But the Mac x86 test would be yet another "nail in the coffin" as people move farther from Windoze.

--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net // Learn Japanese with Step Up Nihongo

Re:AMD64

[Richard McBeef]

I put Red Hat Enterprise 3 on a laptop recently that used to have Red Hat 7 on it. Not surprisingly, the battery drained faster. Performed worse too.

Re:AMD64

[Kythe]

From what I've gathered about Vista, that XP would outperform it on battery life doesn't surprise.

From what I've gathered about Vista, XP would outperform it in just about every way imaginable, except in its ability to funnel vendor-locked-in cash to Microsoft.

Re:AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

Newer linux kernels will support "dynticks" that might slightly extend a laptop's battery life.

Re:AMD64

[MontyApollo]

>But the Mac x86 test would be yet another "nail in the coffin" as >people move farther from Windoze.

If the coffin is a freaking mile long. There are quite a few nails to go. Reading Slashdot can give you a biased view of the real world.

Re:AMD64

[BlueStraggler]

From what I've gathered about Vista, XP outperforms it in that respect, also.

Re:AMD64

[arodland]

Yabbut, it's a tipping point kind of thing. Nobody uses something else because nobody else uses something else. It's like a logistic curve. We've been in the left tail for almost a decade. Now we see modest growth -- just a few percent. But if MS really is slipping, if they don't do something new to improve their situation (and Vista clearly doesn't count) then that's the sign that we're about to be in for the "accelerating growth" phase. Are we ready for that? Well, no. Who ever is? ;)

Re:AMD64

[abanathabla]

I don't think there's any significant difference. Anyone know otherwise?

Well, on my Samsung R65 with an Intel Yonah-class chip (max at 1.6GHz) Gentoo outperforms Windows (XP) in pretty much everything - especially in battery life, but also in heat pro- (or rather re-)duction. With Win the fan is constantly spinning up and down and the poor thing is growing pretty hot. But I'm using very aggressive GPU (NVidia) and CPU-Scaling on the linux-side, so that might be the reason Linux does so much better.

But that's really no surprising result - fire up beryl on linux and see your battery going to hell (I'm losing up to half an hour). The GPU and Graphics memory increase clock cycles by factor four. Though LCD backlight is the most energy consuming device on a laptop, increased GPU and CPU performance can cut down your battery's life pretty hard. As Vista doesn't really care about resources it doesn't make for a good mobile system anyway as resources are pretty hard to find out there in the wireless world.

Re:AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

nice nick...

Re:AMD64

[McGurk]

Apparently you gather everything you read at /., most of which is anti-M$ FUD.
Been running Vista Business on my XPS 1210 for a month and haven't noticed one minute less of battery life. I'll have to test it, now. And everything performs as well as it did with XP. Again, haven't noticed anything slowing down. Best 0$ I ever spent (powertogether.com).

Re:AMD64

[eclectro]

reading Slashdot can give you a biased view of the real world.

Nooo! Surely you jest!

BTW
Please commit this number to memory for the good of mankind: 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Re:AMD64

[Rubinhood]

Tell me something guys. Typical usage leaves the screen unchanged for 98% of the time. How come the video card driver can't figure out when there is no change on the screen and give the battery-eating video card a power-saving rest?

I say it's the drivers' fault. If my estimation -- 98% -- was correct, then Vista *should* be able to get within 98% of XP's power consumption, even with Aero.

(I remember before Vista came out, I thought to myself, "they *MUST* be smarter than letting Vista eat the battery like a 3D-app or a game, even when barely anything changes on the screen." Apparently not...)

Re:AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell is the parent modded +5 Insightful? There's nothing insightful about it at all! If anything, this is funny, but not really insightful in any way...

Re:AMD64

[Andrew Kismet]

Sometimes moderators think something is particularly humourous (or are just plain overzealous on groupthink) so they mod Insightful instead of Funny, as Funny does not grant a karma bonus.

Re:AMD64

[bradavon]

Clearly like most who're bashing Vista you've never even used it. It's miles better, memory management for starters is greatly improved. Superfetch makes applications pretty much just appear.

How about actually using Vista instead looking like an idiot and assuming a few bad reports is the norm.

It would be nice if Slash Dot took the time to source happy Vista reports, of which there are many. MS has sold thousands of Vista copies, yep and those were all from angry customers. Yeah right.

Re:AMD64

[aussie_a]

Its actually an unfair test as what if IBM tweaked the chip so it would run as efficiently as possible under OX X? A better test would be to do it, and then in conjunction to run a test with OS X on a PC and compare it with Vista's performance there. Oh wait, we can't do that because of OS X's DRM.

Re:AMD64

[UncleTogie]

Nooo! Surely you jest!
We're not jesting.... and don't call us Shirley.

Seriously, though, with with number of geeks here that say they're running Vista/XP, I'm kinda surprised that nobody's set up a dual-boot system and timed it.

Any takers?

Re:AMD64

[Ooble]

I run Vista on my MacBook Pro. It eats battery life about twice as quickly as Mac OS when Aero Glass is running. That said, it has much better results on friends' computers, which are designed to run Windows.

Re:AMD64

[dhasenan]

That's entirely hypothetical. It would be a driver issue, though, so it's testable, within some margin: write a replacement driver for the Mac, and then port it to Windows. Compare performance between the two.

Still, you're being paranoid, and just taking an opportunity to make a crack at Macs. I don't think you believe you have a valid point.

Re:AMD64

[osu-neko]

If the coffin is a freaking mile long.

It is. But the nails keep going in nonetheless. People who want instant gratification will be disappointed, but the ultimate goal gets a little big closer every day.

My current desktop is still Windows, but my new laptop is a MacBook, and although I only got one after it became possible to boot Windows on it, and immediately went out and bought Parallels, I almost never use it anymore. When my desktop starts getting too long in the tooth, it's become a lot more likely it won't be replaced by another Windows box again...

Sooner or later, it all adds up.

Re:AMD64

[shaitand]

'And everything performs as well as it did with XP.'

So if I follow. You are saying that Vista is just as good as XP? My own experience differs but lets ignore that for a moment but before we pat MS on the back, lets wait until they can manage to come up with a system that is better than the last one when given 7 years to develop it.

Re:AMD64

[someone300]

I assume that drivers can, but it's more about the efficiency of the applications running on it, and what they tell the OS to redraw and so on. Some of the best non-ultra portable laptops for battery life are Apple laptops.

My parents get upwards of 5:30 hours on their MacBook under normal use on OS X with "Better Energy Savings" selected. On a similar Dell with XP, it's only about 2 hours. If you put XP on my parent's laptop it gets about 2 hours or so. I always assumed that the reason this would be the case is that OS X is composited, which means that the reasonably CPU/Video intensive operation of recalculating and redrawing interface widgets isn't necessary when moving or minimizing or whatever, and that generally the UI is more efficient because it's based in video.

I know for a fact, that writing OpenGL interfaces need not be GPU/CPU intensive (since I am actually a programmer). Quite often, there is a significant increase in performance and reduction in power consumption when using a GL interface because the GPU consumes less power doing the same thing that a CPU could do, since it is more specialised and does it so damn quickly. I had, therefore, assumed that Vista would have better battery life than XP, particularly with all the more recent advances in power consumption reduction and research into how to make systems more efficient.

Maybe OpenGL are more concerned with efficiency in general, DX is a pretty huge API and there doesn't seem to be much of an efficiency/low power computing push in DirectX. At least not on the same level as OpenGL ES and so on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_ES

Re:AMD64

[NiceGeek]

You do know that modern Macs use bog-standard Intel CPUs yes?

Re:AMD64

[McGurk]

Actually, due to readyboost, it very might well be faster loading programs. It definitely is faster coming back from standby. Dropped a massive 20 bucks on a 2gb compact flash for it; glad it at least seems to be working.

BTW, "stupid enough"? DIAF.

MacBooks are MUCH more efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

When not running all those PC-only games and apps.

Re:MacBooks are MUCH more efficient

[Cheezymadman]

And they don't look as good. And they won't do anything that even remotely makes real money. And they won't right click.

obligatory

[Odiumjunkie]

Vista is trying to drain your laptop's battery. Cancel or Allow?

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow or Re-boot.

Re:obligatory

[Jugalator]

You've been using Gnome for too long. It's Allow or Cancel here. :-p

Re:obligatory

[quakehead3]

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Re:obligatory

[Cancel-Or-Allow]

That is correct.

First post...NOT

[SevenHands]

I would have had first post, but I had to plug in my laptop.

Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[metlin]

The one thing I will agree to is that Apple notebooks have some of the best battery lives I've seen.

Everytime I've used an iBook or a Powerbook, I'm amazed at how long the battery lasts. While some other brands (e.g. Dell) have decent battery life compared to others (e.g. HP and Toshiba, at least in my experience), I'm always knocked off by Apple notebooks' battery life.

Now if only Apple notebooks had two mouse buttons instead of hacks around it. :)

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[dal20402]

Also, Apple laptops seem to treat batteries better, at least from my anecdotal experience. Most of the Dell/HP laptop owners I know end up with horrible battery life after not that many cycles. After the same amount of use, my Mac laptops have typically only lost a bit of their capacity. (My current MBP with 180 cycles on the one-year-old replacement battery has about 90% of its original capacity.) Whether this is due to better power-management software, better battery design, or better battery cooling, I couldn't say.

As for the two mouse buttons, it was a problem until Apple came out with the two-fingers-plus-click move last year -- now I definitely prefer that to a physical second button, because the huge first button is still so easy to hit and I never accidentally right-click.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I never had a PPC unit, but the dual core x86 units aren't that great, 3 hours at best. My four year old Compaq gets about 2.5 hours.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Jerry Rivers]

"Now if only Apple notebooks had two mouse buttons instead of hacks around it. :)"

You have a second mouse button on the touch pad as long as you have more than one finger on your hand.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[arrrrg]

My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life. In contrast, the Acer I had before got 5 hours out of the box, and that could be upped to 8 by swapping out the cd drive for a backup battery. Battery life is probably my biggest complaint with my Macbook Pro.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[bassgoonist]

I totally agree, battery life is short...I get 2.5 hours in vista, tops.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[WinterSolstice]

Good on the Acer - I also get 3.5 or so on my MBP, but I get less than 2 on a thinkpad. I get about 45 minutes on the Dell I had before that :D

Maybe I should check out Acer?

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[CRiMSON]

I suggest you replace your battery, My MBP runs easily 4-5+ hours on battery. I usually use it for well more than half the work day on battery without issues.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[seaturnip]

That's only because you've forgotten that Apple batteries are made by Sony, otherwise you'd be complaining about how terrible the battery life is.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[TheRaven64]

I get three hours from my MBP (Core 2 Duo) in the garden with the screen brightness at full. If I'm inside, or in low light conditions and can get away with turning the backlight back down, I get about four hours. This is a bit better than my old PowerBook, but the battery is physically much larger in the MBP.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[PitaBred]

You mean, Apple hates handicapped people? They're such bastards. ;)

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[maztuhblastah]

My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life.

Then dude, you should take it in. There's something wrong with it if it only gets 3.5 hours. I regularly top 4.0. My best time is something like 5.0 when word-processing, when turning the backlight down (the glossy screen helps make that a lot more bearable than it used to be). My old 12-inch iBook G3 (700mhz) could get about 6.0 under those conditions, and 6.5 hours if I clocked the G3 down to 300mhz (iCook.kext and, later, iCooked let you do that). Personally, given how much nicer the MacBook Pro is, I'm willing to trade an hour of battery life for it -- but I know some people aren't.

Also, do you have a 17-inch MacBook? That might be part of the problem too, you know ;-)

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[dal20402]

Both parent and siblings are probably right. The C2D models (both Macbook and Pro) seem to do better than the original CD models, at least to the point where they're not much worse than late G4 iBooks and PowerBooks. My CD MBP gets under three hours *if* wireless is on and screen brightness is max or close to max. I would expect to get 5 hours out of a C2D MBP, or 6 hours out of a C2D MacBook, by turning the brightness way down, turning 802.11 off, and letting the HD spin down.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[addie macgruer]

Running on an ancient iBook G4 here, but just out of interest, certain things I've noticed that have really improved the battery life:

1. Swapping out the hard disk. The old one broke. The cheapest new one I could find in the shop was rated at half the number of amps (0.7A v. 1.4A)

2. Had one of the Sony batteries that got recalled. The new one was enormously better for battery life.

3. Continous upgrading of OS X over the five years I've had it.

4. Switch speed step to "always lowest" when it's on battery power, using the preferences. It's not like I'm going to be encoding DVDs when it's on the battery, and it stops the laptop getting quite so hot in my lap.

5. Turn the display down to minimum brightness. That thing uses about half the battery power, according to the system information tool.

Am now disappointed if I can't get five hours from the battery. Often more, if I'm just on the web or using vim/LaTeX.

My 2c.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[bdjacobson]

My Compaq Sempron (non-low-power-version) notebook gets 6.25h in Windows (12 cell battery). I haven't heard of those new macbooks getting more than 4.5.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Anonymous Coward]

My MacBook (CoreDuo) gets 5+ hours with the screen set to the lowest brightness, while taking notes.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[tomz16]

Anecdotally many things are true... I have a friend who has so far replaced his brand new C2DUO Macbook battery TWICE (under warranty) because it just decided to stop holding a charge one day!

I have a HEAVILY used 5+ year old dell inspiron laptop that still manages to get > 3 hours on the original batteries. (original life was close to 6 hours). Color me impressed, but the point being that individual experiences are usually worthless for determining things like reliability.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I stepped up to my MacBook Pro from a G4 iBook, and I was taken aback by the difference in battery life - my iBook consistently got 5-6 hours of battery life with all of the power-saving features turned on (and according to my iStat widget, the battery still has 80% health!). In contrast, my MBP tops out at about 4 hours with power-saving on. I'm quite aware that this is because the MBP is a more powerful machine, but even so, I hate having to carry around a power adapter now...

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[John Whitley]

Now if only Apple notebooks had two mouse buttons instead of hacks around it. :) IMO, on the Intel-generation Apple notebooks, the two-finger + click is better than having a second button. Two-finger scrolling is awesome, and once you're used to that, it's so much easier to just put down two fingers and click to get the context menu. No contorting hand positions to hit that button. Heck, if it's a long menu that scrolls, you can open it with two-fingers+click then scroll around it quickly. Very sweet.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[teg]

My macbook gets 5 - 5.5 hours if I turn off wireless and do "normal" non-CPU-intensive work.

With wireless on, I get an hour less.

I've had two dells before that (Inspiron 500m, Latitude D810), which hardly had half of that.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only because you've forgotten that Apple batteries are made by Sony, otherwise you'd be complaining about how terrible the battery life is.

Not all of Apple's batteries use Sony's cells. Note how they didn't stop selling them when they had to recall all of Sony's exploding batteries.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[evilneko]

Damn, and I can only squeeze about three hours out of my aging ibook G3. (running ssh and web over wireless)

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Bender Unit 22]

me 2, that is before the battery software upgrade. Now it says 2.5, even after I tried calibration. (I haven't measured what it actually is). It's a month old battery, so it should be fine.

Re:Mac Notebooks Battery Life rules

[Jerry Rivers]

"You mean, Apple hates handicapped people? They're such bastards. ;)"

Hehe. I guess they must! =D

There are more things than aero which drain the ba

[MemoryDragon]

There are more things than aero which drain the battery in vista:
aero is one of the factors, but, there is a lot of additional startup disk processing even after the ui has been started
the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles
the desktop search adds an additional processing overhead etc... etc...

or ot sum it up added automated features simply need energy!

The battery drain is less annoying than another load of idiotic features, UAC for instance is what sudo and the osx do but solved in a totally idiotic fashion, the new explorer is a lousy clone of mac osxs pathfinder (basically a clone of the worst features of finder and pathfinder), the system cofiguration tool setup is outright confusing with display settings for instance being distributed into 5-6 various tools some dont even have the slightest to do with the display settings.

the new start bar is outright annoying to hell, the search is inelegantly solved and annot be put into the tray where it really belongs, no decent desktop switcher, startup times are longer than a fully configured linux.
The Expose copy is outright useless, Vista home allows you to backup for a restore you have to upgrade to ultimate, the wireless configuration is lousy as hell. The half transparent border effect causes motion sicknes... etc...

The only positive thing I really noticed is once it is loaded programs startup in no time, netbeans takes about 4 seconds openoffice around 3 and that on a 5200rpm notebook drive. There seems to be some serious app caching going on which optimizes the load times, especially java programs benefit tremendously from it. Tomcat 0.8 seconds, netbeans 4 seconds awesome.

No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[GroundBounce]

I've started turning off XGL on my laptop when running on battery since it noticably eats into the battery life. This is really just FUD, it's not just a Vista issue.

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[LWATCDR]

That is what I was wondering. To be honest I expected Linux to not do well with battery life since power management hasn't been a big priority for Linux. I want to see OS/X vs Vista on an Apple notebook. Sort of an Apples vs Apples comparison.

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[Tony Hoyle]

It's not just Aero it's the way it hits the disk so much - it has processes in there that for example after writing to a directory it decides to scan the disk and cache the whole directory. Fine in theory but when you've got the disk thrashing for 5+ minutes at a stretch that eats battery on a laptop.

Switching all the search/cache crap off is really hard - there are several services you have to kill, and they're not all obvious.

I switched aero off after about a day. Non aero looks pretty identical to me and uses less memory/cpu.

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[Osty]

It's not just Aero it's the way it hits the disk so much - it has processes in there that for example after writing to a directory it decides to scan the disk and cache the whole directory. Fine in theory but when you've got the disk thrashing for 5+ minutes at a stretch that eats battery on a laptop.

If indexing is your problem, you misconfigured your power settings. By default, a laptop should do little or no indexing while running on battery power ("Power Saver" mode). Assuming you didn't go monkeying around with your power settings, setting them to "High Performance" on battery power, you're probably seeing something else like Defender scanning for spyware or your antivirus scanning for viruses. Personally, I'd turn off real-time protection and just do periodic scans while running on wall power, but that's a question of "security" vs. battery life (I'd choose battery life).

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is just a Vista issue, because XGL is not on by default in any Linux distribution.

One of the major concerns with enabling compositing by default on Feisty was battery life. Lots of people use Ubuntu on laptops, and compositing obviously uses more power. They discussed a system whereby compositing would only be activated while the laptop is plugged in, but it hadn't been written in time for the Feisty freeze. This is part of the many reasons why Mark Shuttleworth said the software itself (Compiz/Beryl) is just not good enough to be on by default.

On the other hand, Aero is on by default on laptops with enough RAM. It's not smart enough to turn itself off to conserve batteries, and most people don't realize that it's eating their battery life. Even for those who know about it, it's a pain in the ass to toggle it on and off every time they switch power, and they end up not using it at all. Microsoft just designed it with total disregard for battery life.

So no, it's not just FUD.

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[physicsnick]

Shit, parent is me. Login didn't take.

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[hollywoodb]

My Dell Inspiron with i915 video gets on average about 10% longer battery life with AIGLX enabled. Maybe its "cheaper" for the GPU to do direct rendering and save CPU cycles?

I'd like to pretend to know how this works, but I'm not going to. So, um, does that mean I must be new here?

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see OS/X vs Vista on an Apple notebook. Sort of an Apples vs Apples comparison. For an "Apples to Apples" comparison, Quartz 2D Extreme would have to be enabled in OS X. Aqua in its current state (Q2D Extreme is disabled) does much less than Aero. If Apple can improve its stability (I assume they will), then Q2D Extreme will be enabled in 10.5 (Leapord, October). Note that the requirements for Q2D Extreme are the same as the requirements for Aero (GeForce 5xxx, Radeon 9500+).

Re:No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX

[hxnwix]

OS X also uses GL for all WM window buffering and display. Yet, it doesn't rape your battery.

Is apple just that good or is the rest of the world just that pathetic?

ubuntu

[monte48lowes]

I am curious how the bettery life compares for two relatively identical laptops with one running Vista (aero on) and ubuntu/kubuntu with beryl. Since Dell will be shipping laptops later this month with ubuntu Feisty it seems like a fair comparison...for battery life only. Mike

Re:ubuntu

[markbt73]

Well, I don't know about newer laptops, but I have an ancient ThinkPad 380D running Damn Small Linux that has about twice the battery life it did in its former life as a Windows 98 machine. It seems like both the HD and the cooling fan run less often now.

Re:ubuntu

[ravishjunk]

I got compaq nx6120 in which I got nearly 2.30 hrs in Win XP and now I completely switched to Ubuntu (and in fawn) it comes to closer 1.30 to 1.45 hrs. I don't know how it will perform for Vista.

Re:ubuntu

[joe 155]

I'm using fedora core 6 with beryl on my laptop - it annihilates my battery life... I get about 10 mins tops. Granted this is a moderately old laptop (about 3 years) but without beryl I get about an hour (more if I drop brightness and cpu power)... its a big drop in life. Running XP I could get something similar to what fedora would give me without beryl. Granted I've not tried vista but I would be amazed if it was different to any significant degree to FC6/beryl... it just takes more power.

Re:ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run Edgy and Vista on a Dell Latitude D610. The battery is a couple years old so it doesn't last as long as it used to. Under Edgy without Beryl and with the screen dimmed all the way, I could squeeze 50 minutes from a single charge. Under Vista without Aero and with the screen dimmed halfway, I managed to squeeze 70 minutes from full charge. I tried this a few times under each OS and and the drain times were consistent. In both operating systems, wi-fi was enabled.

In Soviet Russia....

[trailerparkcassanova]

Macbook drains YOU!!!!

Re:In Soviet Russia....

[Farmer Tim]

Macbook drains YOU!!!!

Steady on, they aren't that sexy...

It could be the sidebar

[bogie]

Whenever you mouse over it, or anything basically happens with it your cpu gets spiked. I'd be interested in seeing if disabling the sidebar helps with battery life. Someone should also compare if certain widgets are causing problems.

Re:It could be the sidebar

[iceOlate]

It's not just when you mouse over the sidebar that the CPU spikes... Moving the mouse ANYWHERE causes it to spike... If I just move my mouse pointer around the screen in a circle, not touching the sidebar, the CPU will still spike up to as much as 30%. Hell, just editing the text in this window here (without moving the mouse) has caused the CPU usage to go up to as much as 7%. This is on a brand new Intel Core 2 Duo machine, with 2GB RAM. It does have a shitty Intel Integrated graphics card though with 384MB shared video memory, so that may have a bit to do with it.

Overall, I'm not impressed with Vista, and am only using it because it was pre-installed in the new workstation I'm using at work. I've also noticed major problems with the wireless configuration (connecting to the wireless access point) on a student's laptop here at the university. Problems that were never present in XP.

Re:It could be the sidebar

[coryking]

Yeah... I dont understand anything about my laptop's power maangement either. Some guy speculated how it might significantly drop the clockrate on the CPU when idle to save power and thus make it appear like the mouse uses 7% of my CPU but that is FUD from paid shills. What do they know!

Fuck Microsoft, I'll use linux instead! Than I wont even have a mouse to worry about because it doesn't support mine!

Disk indexing

[Shados]

The indexing is most definately one of the main issues, I'd dare say even more than Aero. I have 2 fairly noisy SATA drives in RAID 0 (on a desktop machine though), and since I've moved to Vista, they're driving me insane. I have more than enough RAM to turn off swap completly without any issues on Vista, yet I hear the disks scratching sound almost continually.

Thats the only issue I've had with Vista so I guess its not a big deal, but...

Re:Disk indexing

[FLEB]

When, oh when will the OS and app vendors realize-- WE* DON'T WANT INDEXING! I haven't met an indexing or "Fast Search" technology yet that does more than thrash the hard disk when I'm not using it, to give me the convenience of freezing the machine when I actually dare to try. Content-based search is tedious and often pointless (I can't remember the name or the folder. Do you think I can actually recall the content?), and who wants to go around entering metadata on... well, anything.

* "We", being me and... well... everyone else in the world, I'd like to think. I could be wrong, I suppose. It's a rant, you see.

Re:Disk indexing

[coryking]

Dont you like how Firefox will come up with a list that narrows down when you type a URL in the address bar? It almost feels like tab completion, doesn't it?

Wouldn't it be sweet if you could do that on the start menu and just type "ca" + and run calc.exe or just type "not" + and get notepad? Next time you are on Vista, start typing into that "Start Search" box on the start menu and see what you get. Now do you like fast indexing?

Re:Disk indexing

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't met an indexing or "Fast Search" technology yet that does more than thrash the hard disk when I'm not using it

Indeed -- the proper way to do this is immediately, once, when a file is saved. That happens to be how Apple's Spotlight does it, and though many people have other complaints about it, disk thrashing is not among them.

Re:Disk indexing

[Anonymous Coward]

You have mispelt definitely.

Re:Disk indexing

[FLEB]

Sounds similar to Quicksilver on the Mac. The only thing I can really complain about there is that if my hand slips, it's a juggle to get it NOT to load "Canvas Prefs 2 Backup.xpqi" into some OS9 program that hasn't been run in 5 years, from some obscure folder that it has indexed.

Of course, this is my work computer-- small shop with an "If it works well enough, don't screw with it" mentality that means I'm working on a machine that's two settings-clones, a couple former employees, three OS upgrades, and a fair number of years of everyday use removed from anything approaching pristine state. I think I'm still even using a mutated/migrated version of my predecessor's user account. But, it does the job, I suppose.

Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[Lazerf4rt]

I don't know about notebook users, but when I purchased and installed Vista, Aero was not initially running. I had to go select it from the Themes area of the Display control panel.

So when they write the following:

When Aero is turned off, battery life is equal to or better than Windows XP systems. But with it turned on, battery life suffers compared with Windows XP.

Seems like more of an issue with educating users. Although, maybe someone will develop a miserly mobile GPU that's optimized for what Aero does.

Finally, this part of the article is a bit screwy:

Microsoft said it commissioned a study (click here for PDF) that found no difference in "responsiveness," or application load time, between a notebook with Aero disabled versus one running the fancy graphics: implying that Aero doesn't put too much of a load on the system.

I don't think the study implies that. It just says that application load time is unaffected. Aero's going to draw more power through the GPU even when applications are not being loaded...

Re:Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[Rycross]

It was on by default for me, but I had the Ultimate edition. I believe Vista will grade your computer based on its hardware and if its too low, then it will disable Aero by default.

Re:Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[coryking]

Yup. Crappy old video cards = no Aero. Why? Cause Aero actually uses the video card's GPU. If the GPU can't do it, Aero can't run.

In the couple of installs I've done on older hardware, the video card was the only thing that needed to be upgraded. I figure just about anything you can get at Fry's above $75 will work...

Re:Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[Lazerf4rt]

Damn, and I had just purchased a Core 2 Duo system with an NVIDIA 8800 GPU. And it disabled Aero. Kind of a slap in the face. :-) Oh well!

Re:Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[Rycross]

Beats the heck out of my AMD X2 4200 and GeForce 7800 GT, so I think we can write this down to a problem with Microsoft's detection code.

Re:Don't you have to enable Aero manually?

[Jugalator]

Well, you need the 8800 drivers. :-p

Vista was released before the Geforce 8800 wide availability, so you have quite high expectations. ;-)

You should be able to get them after a Windows Update check.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[peragrin]

Why don't you Read that article? MSFT deferred ALL Vista sales from October 2006 to the first quarter.

So everyone who bought a PC for christmas and got a Vista voucher is also counted in that list. So all those Vista Business sales only got counted in the first quarter.

PC sales are down, how can Vista Sales be sky high? maybe because MSFT counted 1.5 quarters of vista sales in one quarter. what they did is technically legal, but one can't judge Vista sales by it because of what they did. As it artificially inflates the numbers.

Lets see who they do in this quarter. Especially with Dell selling XP machines again.

Yeah but

[Elkboy]

The EU will maybe pass a law against minimum battery life or some such. Then there will be support for Vista!

Re:Yeah but

[MM_LONEWOLF]

rather, microsoft will pass laws for minimum battery life requirements, blatantly ignore them, and throw a tantrum if any Dell of HP computers violate them.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[Rycross]

Actually UAC isn't really idiotic, and it doesn't solve the problem in a way thats appreciably different than sudo. It basically does the same thing. The administrator account actually runs as a user, and the UAC will raise it up to administrator for certain tasks.

The thing with UAC is it shows all the security problems, in terms of ACLs and required permissions, that exist in Windows today. People find UAC annoying because they're using software which requires admininistrator privileges. They find it annoying because Windows requires admin privileges for the entire control panel, instead of making permissions more granular, and giving the user some control over his or her own settings. They find it annoying because their ACLs for files and folders are set up wrong.

In my uses of Vista, I see UAC pop ups in three instances: when I'm in the control panel, when I'm installing software, and when I'm running poorly coded software that assumes administrator-level privileges.

So I think its disingenuous to pan UAC when people should really be worried about the Windows security settings that are causing all these "UAC issues."

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[Shados]

Thats interesting about the app caching btw. I've noticed Visual Studio and most .NET apps are zippy quick on Vista, but I figured it was because since Vista uses .NET a lot itself, that all the librairies were already in memory, but if it has the same effect on Java, MS must really have optimised something in there that helps such runtimes...

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[deviceb]

lol.... so you do or do not like Vista? I could not tell.

Not so

[mobby_6kl]

according to Tom's Hardware. There is no difference in power consumption between XP and Vista w/ Aero.

Re:Not so

[dropadrop]

Someone tell the batteries which are draining out!

Re:Not so

[morcheeba]

That test is severely flawed.

First off, it's a desktop, measured at the AC adapter. If a standard laptop took 150W, then the battery would only last 20 minutes. Clearly, laptops take less power overall and the differences caused by the CPU's load will be amplified.

Second, it measures the power at only two points - no load and full load. I suspect that no-load between XP and vista is about the same because they are basically doing nothing. You need a real-use benchmark to compare the two.

Re:Not so

[sweatyboatman]

mod parent up please.

Re:Not so

[tomz16]

The Tomshardware test is for a desktop system. The graphics subsystem on laptops will usually throttle down to conserve power when not in use. (The ATI version of this was called PowerNow on my old Inspiron 4150.) I suspect that the higher graphics load under Aero would prevent the card from throttling as much as it would in XP.

Oh FFS

[Cervantes]

Sheesh... "If you run the spiffy, high-overhead, bells and whistles interface, you know, the one that uses more CPU and GPU, then your battery life may be shortened." Fucking shocking. I'm shocked. I had no idea that if I use my laptop more, and if I use more intensive applications, that my battery life would be shortened. Wow. I thought batteries, just, yanno, powered things for a set amount of time, and I could play games, burn dvds, run my wireless, and turn on Aero, and it would last exactly the same amount of time as it would if I just left it sitting there.

Seriously, the story here shouldn't be "aero drains your battery". It should be "For the first time since laptops became popular, MS is offering an OS that will actually last longer, when properly configured". Vista w/o Aero lasts longer on a laptop than XP. That's pretty damn impressive, actually.

Re:Oh FFS

[TheRaven64]

With OS X, battery life went up for some uses when moving from the older versions that didn't have Quartz Extreme to those that did. While it used the GPU more, it used the CPU less. Moving windows no longer triggered redraw events (which cost a lot of CPU cycles), and compositing on the GPU, which has dedicated silicon for it, was cheaper (in terms of power) than using the CPU.

Re:Oh FFS

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

With OS X, battery life went up for some uses when moving from the older versions that didn't have Quartz Extreme to those that did. While it used the GPU more, it used the CPU less. Moving windows no longer triggered redraw events (which cost a lot of CPU cycles), and compositing on the GPU, which has dedicated silicon for it, was cheaper (in terms of power) than using the CPU.

This may be true on notebooks with integrated graphics (e.g. MacBook) or pissy low-power ATI GPUs (e.g. the iBook), but it's not true with high-power dedicated graphics. One of the reasons that the MacBook Pro has pretty bad battery life (yes, 3.5 hours is bad for a system with a battery that's as big as the MacBook Pro's) is that it has a nice high-power ATI GPU.

Forcing a high-end mobile GPU into 3D mode does draw more power. Not a ton more power - certainly not as much as a 3D intensive application like gaming - but more than drawing 2D shapes.

Every watt counts in a notebook. For a notebook with a 64 W*h (6 cells, 2800mAh, 3.7V) battery to have 5 hours of endurance, it needs to draw less than 13W.

Re:Oh FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a minor quibble, moving windows never triggered redraw events on any version of OS X. (Except for unbuffered windows which always have to redraw, but this is still the case and always will be, it's what they're for.) OS X has always had double-buffered windows, it's just that before Quartz Extreme, the buffers were always composited together using the CPU. With QE, they're composited using the GPU. The end effect is the same, it's just a question of which chip is doing the work.

Why ruin a good thing?

[beerdini]

How long until someone loads Vista on a MacBook and compares run time? Why would anyone want to ruin a perfectly good MacBook by installing Vista even if it is to compare run time?

Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[coryking]

I'll probably get modded down for this, but who cares....

Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!

What this power consumption business really means is hardware manufacturers need to optimize the parts of the GPU that Vista uses so they consume less power. In a year, new "Vista-Ready" laptops will probably use the same, if not significantly less power than their XP optimized counterparts. Less power you say? Hell yeah! Vista has all kinds of goodies for power management that didn't exist in XP; my desktop computer now suspends itself to... something.. after 5 minutes and will instantly wake up. Dunno if XP could that, but it sure as hell didn't on mine. It was default behavior on my Vista install.

Further, Aero is definitly not eye candy and I'd even argue that it is the first version of Windows that *doesn't* have eye candy. The user interface is crisp, snappy, and far more elegant than anything before it. You barely notice the OS is even there; XP & 95 are very "in your face". I personally love Vista - I dare say that when running on proper hardware it really makes you feel the PC has come of age. All prior windows versions feel clunky in comparison.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[caseih]

Please qualify you statements. You mention that XP and 95 are "very 'in your face'" compared to Vista. In what ways are they more intrusive or more "in your face"? In what ways is Vista less intrusive?

With all the emphasis on the UAC, I find it hard to believe that you can go for very long with Vista forgetting that it's even there. But I'm willing to listen to your reasoning.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[coryking]

It is hard to describe. Vista's design just tries to make itself disappear while you are working.

- The window itself is transparent and very desaturated while the content is solid. Because of that, your eye naturally wants to focus on the content, not on the border.

- The buttons are the same brightness, saturation & opacity as the window itself unless you hover of them. On XP they were very bold and in your fact even when idle. Again, less distracting.

- Basically, on Vista /w Aero, the only stuff that is really important is the solid stuff. Far from eye candy, the transparency is really about making your eye want to look at the what is important--the content, not the OS.

As for UAC, you'll laugh, but at least for my parents computer it is the prime driver for upgrading. There is no reason for UAC to kick in unless the program is doing something wrong. Every time it pops up, my mom will me semi-panic'd asking "what is 'some crappy programm.exe', should I click okay"? That right there is awesome...

On my computer, I rarely get it unless it is some old application. Really, programs shouldn't need admin access! If UAC is popup up every five minutes like some people on slashdot seem to think it does, baby you've got big troubles!

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[aquasheep]

Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!

This is true for me at least, and I wish more people could see these benefits. Quick anecdote - I run two monitors on my machine; with most games, the game displays on the primary monitor with my normal Vista desktop on the second. I've found that turning Aero off DECREASES my FPS in the game. I can only surmise that the video card is more than capable of rendering Aero on the second monitor plus what it needs to do in the game, and not taking advantage of that hurts overall.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[dswensen]

Given what's currently happening in the wake of the VT shooting, this might be more +1, Prophetic.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[e2d2]

And here I thought I was the loner that loved the Aero interface. I love the look, I love the response time, and I love the side bar. I sit there and play WoW at 50 frames/sec in a window with other cpu intensive apps such as VS.Net running (hey everyone needs a break) and sidebar open. All on my laptop. I'm happy so far.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[mikiN]

"We Don't Want Aero-Optimized GPU's!"
(We = Those of us who do _not_ run Windows.)

That would be the end of all. First, all graphics chip vendors would begin shipping binary blob drivers for their chips, next they would start requiring payment for GLX/DRI/DualHead/whatever "feature enhanced" versions of same.

What we want is power management optimized GPU's, with high quality source code and documentation for their drivers.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[coryking]

You are right, there is a huge market out there for video cards that come with high quality documentation and source code. HUGE!

Question, if there actually was a market for what you are asking, why can I not go to Fry's or Newegg and buy it? Surely if your idea had merit either you'd be working on it right now, or somebody else has already done it, right?

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[Ant P.]

As for UAC, you'll laugh, but at least for my parents computer it is the prime driver for upgrading.

Hey, mine too.

They couldn't be thankful enough when I upgraded it to KDE for them.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[Ant P.]

If there actually was a market for T1 lines, why can I not go to AOL and get one with my free 100 hour CD?

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[howlingmadhowie]

not quite right i'm afraid

what you mean to say is, you hope that aero uses the graphics processor efficiently. the fact that beryl/compiz does much more and that with an onboard shared-memory graphics chip from 2002 should give you a clue that things are not okay with aero. unfortunately, a clue is all you are going to get, seeing as you're not allowed to know how aero works and you're not allowed to know how the graphics cards work.

so just carry on spouting out opinions as if they're facts.

Re:Bad Drivers / Hardware?

[ptitov]

Windows actually uses GPU to render "old" interface too, it's supported from version 3.1 AFAIR. In case you're not using generic VGA driver, of course.

I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

I got a Compaq Presario laptop with Vista Home Premium about two months ago. It's not a killer laptop, just an Athlon Turion 64 at 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM, but it's sufficient for why I wanted a laptop. Just listening to MP3s through Media Player would shoot the CPU level up to a consistent 35-50% CPU utilization with Aero active. The battery obviously didn't last too long. I finally got so fed up with it that I shut off Aero, dropped the system back to a 2000/XP theme, and installed WinAmp. Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%. Even when I'm just using it for audio editing or photo editing, now I can use it for a few hours as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.

I will give Vista credit in that the laptop comes back very quickly from sleep mode whereas that never worked well for me in XP, but that's about it. Vista with Aero is the plant from "Little Shop of Horrors" -- FEED ME!!!

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[Osty]

I got a Compaq Presario laptop with Vista Home Premium about two months ago. It's not a killer laptop, just an Athlon Turion 64 at 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM, but it's sufficient for why I wanted a laptop. Just listening to MP3s through Media Player would shoot the CPU level up to a consistent 35-50% CPU utilization with Aero active. The battery obviously didn't last too long. I finally got so fed up with it that I shut off Aero, dropped the system back to a 2000/XP theme, and installed WinAmp. Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%. Even when I'm just using it for audio editing or photo editing, now I can use it for a few hours as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.

How long is "didn't last too long"? I have a ~2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 9300, 1.6GHz P4m, 2GB RAM (I upgraded for Vista), 7200RPM hard drive (upgraded for a small boost in speed), and an ATI x300 GPU with 128MB of onboard RAM (not shared with system memory). I use Aero Glass on that laptop all the time, and I still get 3.5-4 hours of battery life if I'm conservative with the LCD backlight. That's with the bigger 9 cell battery rather than a standard 6 cell, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that my battery usage in Vista is on par with my battery usage in XP before upgrading. In fact as far as I can tell the only hit I've taken to battery life is the natural degradation of the battery over time with use.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[coryking]

What video card did it have and did it have the latest and greatest drivers?

On good hardware with new drivers, things will be much more snappy with Aero on than off.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

How long is "didn't last too long"?

Um ... "as opposed to about an hour with Aero active." :) I didn't get the higher-capacity battery because I won't use it on battery too often. But I've noticed a significant difference in battery life with Aero off. I guess I should have included the "YMMV" but I figured that would be implied.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

GeForce 6150, I believe. (I'd have to check. The laptop is at home right now.) The most that I can share out right now with respect to video RAM is 128 MB. It should allow me to double that to 256 MB once I double the RAM to 2 GB. One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable. The only drivers that I needed to upgrade at the time were the wireless drivers, but I was connected to my wired network at the time so the wireless network was shut off.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[Jugalator]

Eeh...?? That's not Aero's fault, but has to be some sort of Compaq driver issue.

Why is pretty simple -- my Aero is not sharing your behavior.
I just checked on Vista: HD movie played at 10% CPU consumption with Aero Glass.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[oGMo]

Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%.

You're telling me that under Vista, it takes 5-10% of the CPU to listen to an MP3? With Aero off? On a 2GHz Athlon64? Right now I've got XMMS playing a high-bitrate MP3 stream with the mini-visualizer on, and I'm running Beryl with the effects turned up... compositing and all that junk on. And it's taking about 3% CPU. And I think that's obscene, because playing MP3s has taken just about 0% CPU for years.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[Jugalator]

You're saying you upgrade all your drivers, but then say you only needed to upgrade the wireless drivers?

Anyway, I'm not sure what Forceware drivers you're on, but I highly recommend 158.18 if your graphics card is supported:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18.h tml

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[coryking]

You might try downloading the driver directly from nVidia rather than wait around for your laptop manufacturer to update their drivers. Dunno about nVidia, but for ATI is pumping out updated vista drivers once a month now that keep getting better & faster.

nVidia claims they support the 6150, but that might not mean it has the brains required to do Aero. It is a hardware thing, not just a memory thing:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18_s upported.html

A huge disclaimer: while using the drivers on nvidia.com (or ati.com) is usually okay on a desktop, on a laptop you might start getting weird problems. I tried using nVidia's native XP drivers on my laptop once, and it would never wake up from hibernation again. YMMV.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[brusk]

Depending on how the AMD CPU slows itself down on battery, and how it reports this (I've never had an AMD system), it might be because the clock speed is so low. 5% of a system running at minimum MHz is better that 1% of one going full tilt.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

Slow down on your reading speed, please. As I clearly said in my previous post, "One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable." At the time there were no video drivers. There has been one video driver upgrade since then, but Aero was turned off before that. I'll check on the driver version when I get home.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

That's an average. It will be nice and low for a while then surge about every four or five seconds to about 10%. But when Aero was turned on, CPU utilization was consistently at 30% with surges to 100% -- all when playing an MP3.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[Osty]

Um ... "as opposed to about an hour with Aero active." :) I didn't get the higher-capacity battery because I won't use it on battery too often. But I've noticed a significant difference in battery life with Aero off. I guess I should have included the "YMMV" but I figured that would be implied.

What video chipset does your laptop have? I'm guessing a discrete chip with its own memory will be both more efficient at running Areo and more power efficient than an integrated chip that steals system memory and CPU resources in order to process shaders (like Intel's chipsets that support Aero). A driver update might help somewhat, but drivers can't changed a shared/integrated architecture into a discrete GPU.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

Ehhh???? And you expect to convince anyone with that statement? "Well, I'm not seeing the same problem, so it's not Aero." Interesting logic you've got there. So, how are things at Microsoft's Tech Support division?

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[AzrealAO]

With Vista Home Premium, with Aero and Sidebar on uses +2% CPU above baseline (baseline is about 4-6%, listening to a WMA Protected song used 6-8% CPU according to Task Manager | Performance).
With the Visulization's turned on, it's using around 20-25% CPU according to Task Manager | Performance.
Interestingly, that was with the Task Manager window overlapping the Media Player visualizer. When I dragged it over so that the window wasn't overlapping, CPU usage dropped by about 5% (down to the 15-20% range)

Whoops, that was with the Powersaver Power Profile. Switched to High Performance, it's using about 8-10% with everything turned on, 1-4% without the visualizer.

So maybe he had visualizations turned on in Media Player in a low power profile (capped CPU speed to 50%), which is where all the CPU was going.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[WidescreenFreak]

I agree. I hate the idea of shared memory. It uses the GeForce 6150 Go chipset. But, I didn't buy this laptop to be a CPU or graphical powerhouse, either. I have my main PC for that.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[evilbessie]

It's probably been said, but I'm feeling lazy and can't be bothered to check. The plant is Audrey II.

Re:I eventually shut off Aero - what a CPU hog.

[SEMW]

...So a single anecdotal data point is enough to convince you that Aero always uses up 30-50% of the CPU; and that taken as given, any posted counterexample must necessary be a Microsoft shill. Right, good logic there.

Mac OS X vs Classic

[mdarksbane]

The same happened with the transition to Mac OS X. Although they have improved power management with the various upgrades, on my old tibook G4 I could get a half hour or more extra battery life running mac os Classic than I could in OS X.

Re:Mac OS X vs Classic

[soft_guy]

Yeah, but they made the wake from sleep time in OS X really really fast compared to OS 9.

Re:Mac OS X vs Classic

[caywen]

The difference here is that for every 5 people pissed about their old MacBooks, there are 95 people pissed about Vista.

Quick question

[Sigma 7]

This will get buried under the imminent ~400 comments, but why would anyone use battery power run a known CPU/GPU intensive component that only gives eye candy?

If you want battery life, try selecting the less complex themes in Vista (e.g. look for Windows classic), and turn off many of the enhancements that run in the background, even if they would make long-term usage easier for you.

MS will eat your (battery's) soul!

[Steve-o-192.168]

MMmmMMm Battery Souls (cells).

It's not a V12 Aston Martin

[cpu_fusion]

Vista is a Pinto with a jet engine mounted on it backwards, painted Zune Brown, with a dealer-installed decal on the side that says "XTREME!!!"

Note: not a troll nor flamebait; just having fun here with the analogy. :)

Re:It's not a V12 Aston Martin

[acidrain69]

>Vista is a Pinto with a jet engine mounted on it backwards, painted Zune Brown, with a dealer-installed decal on the side that says "WOW!". And you have to buy the Ultimate Edition for twice the price to be able to let someone else drive, or do work on the engine.

Fixed that for you.

Re:It's not a V12 Aston Martin

[__aaclcg7560]

Only if the Pinto is equipped with a Sony new-and-improved exploding battery.

Re:It's not a V12 Aston Martin

[Anarke_Incarnate]

It will be dog slow no matter HOW MANY "Type R" stickers you put on that turd

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[MemoryDragon]

Lets say it that way it is a step back from ubuntu and osx...

Re:4.3B last quarter

[gfxguy]

I'd like to add that everyone who bought XP earlier this year got a "free" upgrade to Vista... I know because I was one of them. However, while I paid the shipping and handling to get it ($10), it's sitting in a drawer unused. I wonder how many of those there were, because I'm sure they were counted, too.

With or without ...

[Anonymous Coward]

All the "crapware" on the typical out-of-the-box Windows laptop? Now that dual core is routine, the vendors are even less ashamed about adding bloat that burns only a few % CPU in the background. The load doesn't affect performance noticably most of the time (unless running something CPU intensive), but it is chewing through the battery watt-hours for little or no value.

I'm going to test this for myself!

[Sneakernets]

My friend and I have the same laptop, with the same battery. I have an extra HD for my computer, I'm going to install Vista on mine and boot his and mine both to the desktop, and then unplug them.

Let's see which one dies first.


I will post my findings as a reply to this message...

Re:I'm going to test this for myself!

[pclminion]

An experiment with one control and one variation? Impressive. Remind me how you do a T-test for sample size 1?

Re:I'm going to test this for myself!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any results yet? It's been around three hours. :)

Re:I'm going to test this for myself!

[Anonymous Coward]

He'd post his results, but the battery died.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[MemoryDragon]

There are several problems with UAC, the main problem is that the dialog pops up constantly with old software hence basically renders the entire access control pointless! You cannot customize uac to the level that you basically say once uac has been granted to a certain app for a certain critical op, the dialog should not popup anymore, you cannot really trim it down in a significant way it is either uac full or no uac at all. The main problem in the way Microsoft solved the entir thing is, that the dialog pops up constantly, and after a while you simply hit the ok button without even thinking about it and reading the text, hence rendering the entire uac totally pointless. There would have been several ways to resolve this issue elegantly. a) Simply sandbox legacy apps in their own rootspace (jailroot them) and have no uac at all for them b) Make the UAC more intelligent in the way that it remembers the grants which have been given to an app during execution time instead of forgetting it From all possible solutions to deal with the problem Microsoft has chosen the worst one!

From a MacBook Pro owner

[theheff]

Vista (with Aero) battery life, under normal conditions, is about 2/3 of the battery life that I get when running OS X on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. I've noticed that Vista does have very good CPU power-savings; it doesn't use full processing power until it is necessary. What I can't figure out is why XP/Vista makes the MacBook Pro run so much hotter. OS X definitely has the higher RAM usage, and CPU usage is nearly the same, yet OS X runs cool and quiet while both Windows installations I've had run warmer. Maybe it's a driver inefficiency or something... it also did this on a Core Duo MacBook I owned. Hmm.

Re:From a MacBook Pro owner

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a driver inefficiency, per se. The rumor is that Apple drivers underclock the Radeon chip, so it creates less heat and uses less power.

Re:From a MacBook Pro owner

[evilbessie]

It's driver issues, I'm not sure that Apple will fix them properly, but they might as they might be on to a good thing with Windows on Macs. As more people will buy Macs because they can run Windows, and you will get some of those users hopping the fence. We have it happening where I work, more users are buying Macs because they do allow them to use Windows, through boot camp or Parallels (or both...). I wonder how long and what market share Apple need to become evil...

And it really seems to work too

[Sycraft-fu]

Just got a new laptop for a professor. It claimed a 5 hour battery life but I'm always skeptical of such claims. Well, after a trip to Australia, he tells me it walks the walk. He said that the battery life was superb, easily working all day at a conference (being put to sleep during down times) with power to spare. That's with Vista on it with Aero enabled. Maybe you'd get even better battery life with Aero off, but it seems like there's nothing really to complain about as it stands.

Vista-ready

[Ash-Fox]

Wait... Apple's hardware is Vista-ready?

Does it have any sort of Vista logo testing at all?

Re:Vista-ready

[Tarlus]

Any Win2k/XP capable computer can run Vista. Just not every computer can run it smoothly with Aero sitting on top of it.

Microsoft really should have printed stickers that said "Aero Ready" instead of "Vista Ready", since any modern PC can run Vista in some form or another...

Re:Vista-ready

[Ash-Fox]

Microsoft really should have printed stickers that said "Aero Ready" instead of "Vista Ready", since any modern PC can run Vista in some form or another...

That's not the point, just because it can "run" doesn't mean the hardware is fully supported.

If the hardware for power-saving isn't supported properly (and acknowledged officially) in the first place, how is this relevant comparison?

We all know that some past hardware from older versions of Windows don't work on newer, so if it's got logo testing for Windows XP, it's not relevant either.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[MemoryDragon]

There probably are two factors. Microsoft probably preloads a load of .net dlls (I am sure the minute disk thrashing after the entire ui is there is partially caused by some of those things) but also it really seems they did a serious caching to ease the pain of apps which have to rely on a load of dependencies.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[Rycross]

I can't say I've ever had UAC pop up more than once for a certain app or op. I wonder if it has problems if a process launches other processes? I know that I encountered problems with Macromedia installers on a Windows XP box using "Run As..." (which UAC is probably using at least partially), because the installer would launch other installers in such a way that the permissions for the new process dropped back down to user level.

I think there should definitely be a way to flag programs as "Don't show me UAC for this, just elevate." Maybe a check box on the UAC popup? But then again, there might be security issues there that I'm not seeing.

Same massive error found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Trent Hawkins]

The same massive error is also found in the hit video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

It seems that even with the latest patch of the game and with the best video card running this persistent error of programming drains laptop battery life like there's no tomorrow.

Eta fseo Mikrasoft delaet! Yop tvayu mats!

Re:Same massive error found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nyet, yop tvayu mat!

FWIW, there's no /s/ at the end of "mat" in Russian; there's a soft sign, which causes the preceeding consonant to be palatalized, which to the untrained ear can sound like a /s/.

Re:Same massive error found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Trent Hawkins]

slushai huy, na kiborde netu etai knopke tak ya pichatayu ruski s angleiskimi knopkami. Tak vasmi svoy hui ee yabai tvayu mamu ti pidaras. Panimaish? ;-)

Re:Same massive error found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[andreyw]

Obshaemsya s samim soboy? Pozdravlyayu.... rofl.

Driver improvements will help

[binaryspiral]

I know that the thinkpad power manager drivers were very beta when Vista was released. This lead to extremely short battery lives - like %50 that of a properly configured XP machine.

The OS has an enormous amount of control over power consumption - from cpu, gpu, and memory speeds to hard drive caching, lcd refresh and brightness. If these drivers suck - then so will the power consumption.

As updates trickle out from Lenovo, it's improved greatly, but not close to XP. With more intensive GPU requirements of Aero (if you so wish to run it while unplugged) I don't see where you'll be able to meet XP's power consumption when running in basic theme with all the GUI features disabled.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Linked to your blog where you have the actual content in Flash. Typical stupid shit from the retarded asshat tcopeland.

'feature'

[wbren]

Of course one of the new 'features' of Vista is supposed to be better power management.

Why did the submitter put the word 'features' in quotes? Was he trying to convey a negative connotation? Couldn't be, this is a Microsoft story on slashdot. See, better power management really is supposed to be a new feature of Vista, and it's a legitimate feature (unlike the increased DRM 'feature').

Re:'feature'

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did the submitter put the word 'features' in quotes?

You must be new here =)

"It looks like more issues with Vista drains [sic] notebook batteries. Using the Aero interface really eats into your notebooks [sic] battery life. Of course one of the new 'features' [sic] of Vista is supposed to be better power management. This provides a great opportunity for a showdown. How long until someone loads Vista on a MacBook and compares run time? It would provide a flat playing field now that Apple makes Intel-powered notebooks."

Maybe it has something to do with the poor quality of public schools in the United States? I can't think of any other reason why someone who submits "news for nerd" [sic] would be semiliterate.

Re:'feature'

[owlstead]

"See, better power management really is supposed to be a new feature of Vista, and it's a legitimate feature (unlike the increased DRM 'feature')."

They have said that for all the previous OS as well, and I must say that - on average - power management on Windows systems is really bad. This could be because MS is not in the computer business (Apple can change the drivers pretty easily, which MS can't). But to call better power management a new feature *again* is really taking it a bit too far. Of course, the quotes should have to be around "new" as well, as in "new features". I do not even dare to try it on my old laptop though, is was designed for Windows 2K, and it patently refuses to have anything to do with power saving modes in XP (hanging itself when it is restarted).

I don't think it is indexing

[Sycraft-fu]

Probably the prefecth engine. What I notice with Vista is that when I quit a memory intensive app, the disks immediately start up. As far as I can tell from what I've read Vista is loading back up it's cache in to memory. Rather than the simple system XP used, which was to just leave data in RAM until the space was needed, Vista takes an active approach and tries to load up things you use frequently to cut down on load times.

One thing that may help with the noise is to get a flash drive to do ReadyBoost (since it would then probably read from the flash), but the real answer is to get better HDs. It is not hard to get HDs that are very quiet these days.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[Cheezymadman]

And what's wrong with no UAC at all? I turned it off via the registry as soon as I figured out how, and I haven't had a single security issue. No firewall or (constantly running) AV, either. Just my brain, telling me what not to click on. I run AV checks every so often, just to be on the safe side, but other than that, I have a perfectly secure PC without som much as a safety net.

Us users that actually know what we're doing have no use for the UAC. It's for the Myspacers and Kazaa'ers that download everything under the sun, then wonder why it takes their computer 10 minutes to boot.

The Default Power Settings Disable Aero

[ThinkFr33ly]

When you go on batter power the power settings switch to "power saver", by default.

The "power saver" profile turns off Aero, although keeps desktop compositioning enabled. (I think.)

The article wasn't clear on whether or not it was the Aero theme (with all the pretty transparencies) or the desktop compositioning, that was causing the power drain.

Solution

[quakehead3]

I'd re-install vista in 2 minutes ;)

Haven't run a battery comparo, but...

[Anonymous Freak]

I have Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro, and the fan runs faster in Vista with 'Dreamscene' desktop on, but the computer otherwise idle, than it runs in OS X when I have a distributed computing running 24/7.

I'll have to try a battery rundown comparison tonight when I know I'll be running the battery down.

Re:Haven't run a battery comparo, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

AS I posted to the other mac book pro owner, the rumor is that Apple runs the Radeon at lower clock frequency; Windows would run it at full speed, causing more heat and shorter battery.

Re:Haven't run a battery comparo, but...

[Anonymous Freak]

The Radeon is underclocked in firmware. It is 'slow' in both OS X and Windows. I use ATITool to "re-clock" it when playing games, but otherwise leave it underclocked in Windows.

Agreed

[Tarlus]

Vista in Windows Classic mode has nearly the exact same hardware requirements as 2k/XP. Being the system-tweaker that I am, I always disable superfluous graphical effects (even the fade-in/fade-out of menus, since I like things to pop up instantly). Especially under Vista, on my laptop, the very first thing I did was reduce it to Windows Classic and kill every process I could kill (same routine I go through on fresh XP installations), and the thing will go 4.5 hours on the battery, which is exactly the same battery life that XP gets.

And anyway, shiny and transparent graphical effects are overrated. I'll take a clean Win2k-style GUI any day. :P

Re:Agreed

[coryking]

Yeah... screw Microsoft - those bastards and their bloat! I know! I'll just fuck around with parts of the system I really know nothing about.

I know people like you. You are the kind of guy who takes off the catalytic converter because you think it reduces your milage. You are the kind of guy who turns of overdrive on modern cars because you think you'll wear the tranny out faster*. You are the kind of guy who tries to uninstall IE or deletes random files. Than, later when things stop working right, you blame Microsoft or GM for screwing up when it really was you fiddling!

I bet your computer is now more unstable, more insecure, and worse, slower, than it was when you installed it.

- On modern hardware Aero will make your system much more responsive.**
- ReadyBoost = Faster. I'm assuming "kill every process I could kill" means you disabled this.
- Superfetch = Faster. Again, I assume you turnen this off.

3 months from now you'll be bitching about how slow Vista is but it will only be your fault for fucking around with its internals.

* I turn it off in traffic so I get some engine-braking...
**On semi-modern hardware with a semi-modern videocard that can do DirectX 9...

Re:Agreed

[Tarlus]

"I know people like you."

Uh..... actually, no you don't.

In fact, you appear to be blowing smoke out your ass. I know you're just trying to make yourself sound relevant and important since this is an online forum that can preserve your anonymity. I say this because otherwise, you would have paused to perhaps give the benefit of the doubt before jumping your little gun there.

I say you jumped the gun because you automatically assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. Such as deleting IE and important system files. Uh, no. Don't know where you drew that conclusion from. Because heaven forbid somebody on a page like /. would know something about computers!

My computer is incredibly fast stable because I removed unnecessary processes and tasks that, as the original parent of this thread had said, are there to deliver shortcuts and conveniences that ultimately aren't necessary.

So, nice try with your little argument there. Next time, remember that helps to know what the hell you're talking about before you start trying to sling shit at people you know nothing about.

Re:Agreed

[coryking]

Awesome! Which processes that are enable on a stock Vista install make it slow. Further, what was your method of deducing they were, in fact, making it slow?

Re:Agreed

[Tarlus]

Where to begin...

1. When did I say it was a stock installation?
2. When did I say there was a compromise in performance?
3. Why do you give shit?

Re:Agreed

[Sigma 7]

- On modern hardware Aero will make your system much more responsive.** If you have a citation for that, you can add it to Wikipedia. Otherwise, you may have confused "responsive" with "efficient".

- ReadyBoost = Faster. I'm assuming "kill every process I could kill" means you disabled this. ReadyBoost requires an external USB Flash drive. If you don't have such a compatible device, you can't use it to begin with.

Also, there is a distinction between "processes" and "services". Windows is able to operate with the bare minimum of processes (which can be viewed in Safe Mode, or alternativly disabled through MSConfig). The only real issues is your 3rd-party AV/FW software not starting up automatically, and special notebook buttons not working. However, disabling services arbitrarly will impact system performance negativly.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[coryking]

Or my parents computer. Once I get vista on their machine, I'm gonna train my mom to call me every time that UAC business pops up. You shouldn't get UAC popups under normal use. Personally, UAC is the most compelling reason of all for me to recommend upgrading their computer.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[gad_zuki!]

>Vista home allows you to backup for a restore you have to upgrade to ultimate

Well, that's just a lie. The normal backup works fine. If you want the shadow copy service (VSS) then pay for it.

The rest of your post is subjective semi-mindless bitching, but as long as its anti-MS I'm sure you'll get +5 informative or insightful.

Which was it?

[DogDude]

Well, you haven't proved anything. If anything, I'd guess that Media Player was the hog, not Aero. But, since you switched both at the same time, you'll never know.

Re:Which was it?

[WidescreenFreak]

Actually, I tried it with just WinAmp first. I still saw upwards of 20-25% steady CPU usage with occasional surges (for no apparent reason) to anywhere between 66 and 100% CPU utilization. Less than the 30-35% with Media Player, but still unacceptable. So, when WinAmp didn't "solve the problem", I shut of Aero completely. CPU utilization plummeted afterwards.

Still doesn't necessarily prove that it's Aero itself, but it does prove that there was something about having Aero turned on that wasn't efficient.

Re:Which was it?

[DogDude]

Cool. I've always hated Windows Media Player with a passion that I reserve for ex-wives and other things of that magnitude.

Conflicting Stories

[DJ-Dodger]

The fine folks at the Tech Report did a report on this months ago and found the difference between Aero and non-Aero was only about a watt. They don't disprove that Vista uses more power than XP, but I'd say they prove Aero isn't the culprit if that's the case. Oh and I at least trust the Tech Report guys - ZD Net hasn't inspired a lot of confidence lately. http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10945

Listening to WMA's on my Inspiron 6400

[Anonymous Coward]

With Vista Home Premium, with Aero and Sidebar on uses +2% CPU above baseline (baseline is about 4-6%, listening to a WMA Protected song used 6-8% CPU according to Task Manager | Performance).
With the Visulization's turned on, it's using around 20-25% CPU according to Task Manager | Performance.

Interestingly, that was with the Task Manager window overlapping the Media Player visualizer. When I dragged it over so that the window wasn't overlapping, CPU usage dropped by about 5% (down to the 15-20% range)

Whoops, that was with the Powersaver Power Profile. Switched to High Performance, it's using about 8-10% with everything turned on, 1-4% without the visualizer.

So maybe he had visualizations turned on in Media Player in a low power profile (capped CPU speed to 50%), which is where all the CPU was going.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Anonymous Coward]

> So everyone who bought a PC for christmas and got a Vista voucher is also counted

Microsoft's customers are not 'everyone who bought', but are Dell, Gateway and Walmart. The discounting depends on the volume bought, so each customer bought a few months supply and this is mostly sitting in warehouses. Yes, you are correct that it also includes XP plus vouchers from months ago.

why...

[greywire]

is anybody suprised, and further, upset about this?

XP makes no use of the 3D hardware in your computer.

Vista uses the 3D hardware to do all the GUI rendering, including lots of extra stuff like alpha blending the window layers, zooming in and out and "wobbling" the windows and dialogs. That means all that silicon that used to sit there doing nothing is now working, which means more electricity being used.

And in case you haven't noticed, 3D chips are sucking up as much or more juice than CPU's these days.

So of course, vista (with aero enabled) drains your battery faster.

Is there a half-way mode with vista? IE use the 3D compositing (which in theory takes the load off your CPU) but turn off all the blending and zooming etc? That, in theory, should give *better* battery life than XP..

A man walks into a bakery...

[Pap22]

From the ZDnet article:

But laptop users who spent extra money on powerful laptops to handle the graphics requirements of Vista and the Aero interface are forced to run the aesthetic equivalent of Vista Basic, the low-cost version of Vista, if they care about battery life.

So the man walks in and says "I'd like to speak to the manager and file a complaint."

The salesperson behind the counter asks what the problem is.

The man says "Well my cake is gone."

The salesperson says "What did you do with it after we sold it to you?"

The man replies "I ate it. Why?"

This always seems to happen

[caywen]

FWIW, I'm absolutely pissed about my DV9000T always sounding like a Harrier jet and losing nearly an hour of battery life. I'll bet that the Desktop Composition team simply didn't consider battery life during its development. I'll bet it became a concern after the project signoff, and after the concern was raised: 1. Program management went off looking for excuses and workarounds 2. The engineers scrambled to tweak the code in whatever way they could 3. The PR team scrambled to tout the new sleep mode and mobility center to sell the mobility story I don't believe for an instant that Vista was designed to be power friendly at any early point in its development. If it were, it wouldn't have been an issue during beta, it wouldn't have required workarounds and clarifications, and it wouldn't have found its way to be a high profile story on CNET. I've since turned off Desktop Composition and have found Vista to perform closer to XP in terms of power usage. I suppose one day when AMD and NVidia have GPU's specially designed to not bake your laptop under Vista, this will be yesterday's news. But for now, shame on MS.

Re:This always seems to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 9000T too, I've found that it only sounds like a windtunnel on the performance settings. If you click the battery and switch it over to power saving mode, I find it calms down quite a lot. Which you could also turn the display brightness way down, in fact as an experiment I'm typing this with the display turned all the way down. It's dim, but still has extremely high contrast, and very easy to look at. And I'm in a somewhat brightly lit room, not direct sunlight or anything though. Wireless settings can obviously have a large impact. But on performance settings, and playing a game I get about exactly 2 hours out of the high capacity battery.

Re:This always seems to happen

[caywen]

I tried switching to power savings mode, but the fan still blows hard. I do find that if I prop up the back of the laptop, once in a while the fan will slow down. I guess that's because it slightly improves the ventilation on the DV9000T. Still, never had to prop up anything or alter power savings mode under XP. I've never been this unhappy with any OS except Windows Me.

Re:This always seems to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. I agree the fan placement is inconvienent, but if I put my 9000T in powersavings mode, it doesn't use the fan. Like right now, I'm in performance mode, and the fan isn't even blowing. Although I have altered how I sit somewhat to account for the fan placement. It's weird. I'd origionally intended to either wipe Vista off and go with some flavor of linux and KDE, or at least run them in tandum. But my experience with Vista has been so great, particularly with the media center and quick play, and media player working so well that I downloaded Virtual PC 2007 and installed a Mandriva image for those rare occasions I'll be using linux now. Everything I've wanted to do has been so effortless in all seriousness Vista was something of a blessing. I've never been as happy with any of my other computer builds or purchases. My lone complaint, in fact, would be the fan placement. My experiance was so positive one of my friends got a similar 9000T in a package with the ATSC tuner, and aside from Comcast that's been fantastic.

On the otherside of that equation, I ended up having to setup and lockdown a wireless network from some guys using Macs. I hated OS X, in no way was that choice for me, but for them it was brilliant. It's funny how important, truly important, the little quirks and differences are. In the end, they are, or seem to be, the everything of our happiness. In the end it was just serendipity that I ended up with what I did. Had I not seen a small mid-week one page ad, I wouldn't have gotten this laptop or the discounts which led me to getting Vista Ultimate, the better screen et al. I would have waited, I would have seen Dell selling laptops with Unbutu, and that's almost certainly how I would have gone. It's hard to imagine I'd be in the place I am now where my home is where my laptop is. With tavel looming, it really worked out for me. I wish I had more to help you with. All I can really offer is switch it up, and hopefully you'll find someway to be comfortable and keep the air path beneth the fan unobstructed.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[Reality Master 101]

the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles

Look, I know that DRM is really unpopular, but could we not have absolutely ridiculously stupid assertions like this that DRM is affecting everyting "left and right" and is somehow running down the battery in a noticeable way?

Sheesh.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[ThinkFr33ly]

Even if you don't count the deferred sales, Vista did extremely well and *still* beat expectations.

Here is a quote from Paul Thurrott's analysis:

Allow me to predict one of the weak complaints Vista bashers will make about Microsoft's financial results: They'll charge that Microsoft's earnings last quarter were artificially inflated because the company previously deferred revenue from the free and low-cost Vista upgrades offered during the 2006 holiday season. So is it true? According to Microsoft, the company deferred $1.67 billion in revenue from the last calendar quarter of 2006 until the first calendar quarter of 2007, or about $1.14 billion in profits. But even without that one-time gain, Microsoft's revenue would have been up 17 percent. More to the point, the slice of the pie that Windows is responsible for would have still jumped a whopping 30 percent. Microsoft CFO Christopher P. Liddell said that regardless of trends, sales of Vista were $300 million to $400 million higher than the company's internal projections. Sales of Office 2007 were about $200 million higher than expected. You claim that PC sales are down, and indeed they were down, until Vista hit the market. Vista caused a complete reversal in the PC sales trend. This is even more surprising since Microsoft missed the holiday window for the Vista release.

So despite the best efforts of many people in the media, and certainly Slashdot, The Register, and similar anti-MS sites, Vista has done extremely well. My bet is that it would have done even better if all this FUD wasn't being spread.

Maybe, just maybe, you're all wrong about Vista. Maybe, just maybe, Vista is a really damn good OS. Stop regurgitating the FUD and try the OS for yourself.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[MemoryDragon]

Ahem... good luck for having a call every second minute, but sorry it is like that.
I will give you an example, a certain app which I normally regard high, due to its production values at a certain configuration writes 4 times into the registry always at the same keys. What happens now is, that uac pops up 4 the app wants to write into the registry window dialogs within 3 seconds, you see the problem.
And it is not the only problem in this area, basically every app trying to behave like an old windows app has to be either pushed into admin mode or you have to live with uac.

Dont get me wrong, I ran separate user accounts also back in the XP days, but, it was less annoying, once an app was dedicatedly pushed into the admin domain it was silent afterwards, because windows assumed you knew what you were doing when you installed as a root user.

UAC is really broken by design and could be fixed, the saner solution, pushing out jailroots for legacy apps which want admin access was not done by Microsoft, probably due to ignorance, also a sane solution of a uac level 1 pseudo root where apps can be registered and uac is only used for the install and then deactivated also was not done, the third sane solutin at least cache the results of submitting uac oks for some time also was not done, they chose the uac annoys the hell out of the user way!

I once had vista on my laptop

[sebsa]

I would never pay for it, but I got this OS parody via MSDN for free, so I gave it a try. Sure, it ate my batteries, but this was not the worst. Try this: 1. Plug in a mouse, then "shut" the laptop. Vista goes standby 2. Remove the mouse. Whenever I did this, Vista started the cpu fan (swooooooosh), showed the desktop (I guess, it was shut, but you could see "light"), played the "USB Device unplugged sound", and went back to standby. I don't know if this has been fixed in the meantime, but this was one major reason to switch back to xp. I won't try vista again until service pack 5 or so.

Re:I once had vista on my laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X actually behaves the same way, and i find it just as annoying as you do.
How does removing a USB device imply that i want to use the computer right now?
Maybe it's a lower level hardware problem, i.e. the same signal for connecting/disconnecting a device and pressing a mouse button to intentionally trigger a wakeup from standby.

Re:I once had vista on my laptop

[sebsa]

So Microsoft did a good job. They did not only copy the gui, but also the bugs.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, so they made 4.3 BILLION in 1.5 quarters, not just 1 quarter!?

Holy shit I guess they're swirling around the drain then, huh? Imagine only raking in roughly 2.8 Billion in a quarter - what fools!

Power management

[fishbowl]

I bought my Macbook Pro specifically because it was the first notebook I had tried that ran a unix-like OS with working power management. This represented me finally giving up on having a linux notebook with fully working power management. I have since realized that I am only one of very many who have switched from Linux to Mac, at least for portable use.

Bullshit.

[ZPWeeks]

Unfortunately Slashdot has turned into flaming-arrow land for Vista. I'm dual-booting Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu 7.04 on a 9-month-old Dell E1405 with the normal 6-cell battery. The model is known for good battery life, and if anything, Vista makes power management *better*. There are tons of customizations, so I have it set to go all-out performance when I'm plugged in (my laptop is a desktop replacement) and to reasonably dim the monitor and dynamically underclock (with Intel SpeedStep) and such. I regularly get 4-5 hours of battery life in the default "power saver" mode in Vista. (Yes, Aero and all.) Most Linux distros have a long way to go with power management. I get great life out of Ubuntu with Beryl disabled, but I can't customize almost anything without screwing with configuration files. openSUSE was a bit better with clocking my cores down to 1.0GHz while on battery, but it still has a way to go.

Re:Bullshit.

[blackicye]

I've also noticed this on my ~1 year old Lenovo Thinkpad R50e.
I've got it quad booting Edgy Eft, vista, xp and OSX86 10.4.3

Its not running aero because I've only got intel integrated 855 video, but the battery life between all 4 of them with wifi on (except in OSX, I can't get the Intel PRO wireless working) is pretty much the same, I didn't see any noticeable differences in the battery life between OSes.

Re:Bullshit.

[DjRenigade]

what do you have like a 200gig HD on that laptop. With all that shit on there where do you keep the documents and programs??

Re:Bullshit.

[blackicye]

I've got a 100GB Toshiba in there, I paid $60 for it. and the standard 40GB one that came with the thinkpad is in an external USB case.

I have 55GB allocated for data applications etc, and the rest partitioned out for the 4 OSes. I require all of them (well except OSX) for testing builds of my companys in-house software.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Kythe]

Maybe, just maybe, Vista is a really damn good OS.

Considering that the vast majority of those buying Vista would have done so sight unseen (on new PC's), drawing the conclusion that "Vista is really a damn good OS" from the sales values, even if they're what you say, is a bit unwarranted, don't you think?

shorter battery life ?

[l3v1]

No wonder, I mean Aero might not use much CPU but it uses the GPU and surprise, your GPU runs with electricity too... Not much use for "better" power management if the GPU keeps draining power.
 

Subject is off..

[abc_los]

...should read "Vista Eating Life". I know a part of me dies everytime I hear about Vista.

Mod parent up godammit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that's some funny flamebait!

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[coryking]

Right click on the program's short cut and go "Run as administrator". Now it only annoys you once when you start it up, not for the entire duration of the program. Ain't perfect, but really the fault is with the vendor. UAC is just annoying enough that I really think that if we properly educate our users who is really at fault than it just might put enough pressure under software vendors to clean up our app. Telling them "UAC sucks and you should turn it off, M$ sucks" is only enabling these lazy vendors to continue writing bad applications and than blaming Microsoft when they break. Microsoft gave us a really good, highly annoying tool to use to finally club these vendors into compliance!

As for jailroots, see also "virtual store". It ain't really the same as on unixy things but seroiusly; adding a whole damn layer under these crusty apps so they can happily think they are writting to program files or bad parts of the registry was simply brillant. Sadly, I've found that once you mark programs as "run as admin" the program can again start mucking around in program files just like it shouldn't be.

I'm Running Both On My MBP...

[Philodoxx]

I get approximately 30-45 minutes (unscientifically tested) more battery life from OS X.

What boggles my mind the most of all is that Vista has no provision for automatically disabling the Aero interface based on the power source. I'm sure the power disparity would go away if Aero would disable itself as soon as I switched over to battery power. As example: I can hear a fan (presumably GPU) kick into high gear just sitting on the desktop doing nothing. To me that is completely ridiculous and Microsoft should be investigating a way to fix it.

Re:I'm Running Both On My MBP...

[caywen]

Yo - completely agree. My DV9000T is now running non-AeroGlass so it no longer does this. But while it had AeroGlass turned on, I could hear my laptop, which was supposedly idling, from the next room. The fan was that loud. If Microsoft does not respond to this soon, I call shenanigans!

Re:4.3B last quarter

[ThinkFr33ly]

I'm drawing my conclusions about Vista based on personal experience. I've been running it since the day it was released on MSDN in November '06.

I read these "reviews" online, which are so completely off base and inaccurate, I'm not surprised so many people think Vista is a steaming pile.

But the fact of the matter is that virtually all of the complaints about Vista are easily debunked. Whether it's the DRM FUD, the performance FUD, the "Vista is just a pretty face on XP" FUD, the "UAC is popping up CONSTANTLY" FUD, or any of the other baloney I've read.

Is Vista perfect? Hell no. But the minor issues it has are dwarfed by how much better it is than XP in virtually every way.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is it legal, as you say, it's far easier to balance the books. If they wanted to count the revenue from the OEM sales in 2006 Q4 they'd also have to count a liability of having not yet fulfilled that order -- it's a zero-sum game at that point, because they've received funds (AR) but have not yet dispensed the copy of the OS (liability/AP). It's MUCH easier to add neither the revenue nor the liability in the Q4 numbers and instead, just add the renvenue a couple months later.

But as far as naysayers (read: apple fanboys) talking about how it wasn't good for MS, tell me...what are the numbers coming in for sales of OS X again? Whoops, my bad. Reality sucks, eh?

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Kythe]

Fair enough. But it should be noted that reports of Vista's performance hit compared with XP are not simply coming from MS-haters. They're across the board. Your experience is obviously different, but there are an awful lot of people, many of whom have no record of being anti-Microsoft, who say otherwise.

I'm no fan of Microsoft. But I want to make clear: my aversion to Vista isn't based on who it's made by: right now, I run XP Pro. However, I see absolutely no reason why I should have to buy a computer that would otherwise be classified as absolutely cutting edge (and just a few of years ago would have cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars) just to get adequate performance out of the operating system.

I also have a deep, deep aversion to "upgrading" to an operating system that is explicitly designed to limit what I can otherwise legally do with content. From everything I've read (no, not just here) that's not FUD: it's an explicit design goal Microsoft had with Vista.

Turn it off

[Apreche]

I recently purchased a Fujitsu P7230. I couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax, even though I was going to run Ubuntu, so I got Vista Home Basic, which was the cheapest option available. I used it for a few weeks before installing Ubuntu, so I could learn about Vista. I might not use Vista full-time, but it would be a good experience. Besides, if I have to pay for it, I'm going to get something out of it.

The P7230 is an ultraportable laptop with incredible battery life. If you fill both battery bays and enable CPU frequency scaling, you can run it for 8 hours without plugging it in. In Vista without Aero (which this machine can't really handle anyway), I would get up to 11 hours of battery life. In Ubuntu I can maybe get 9. I still use Ubuntu full-time, but don't tell me that Vista has worse battery life. Turn off your useless eye-candy if you care about your battery. I'm sure beryl would kill my battery life even worse.

Why a MacBook?

[allio]

Why shoehorn an Apple product into a story that has nothing to do with them? Any laptop capable of running both XP and Vista with Aero would provide a fair basis of comparison.

Re:Why a MacBook?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't shoehorned. Comparing XP to Vista is ok and "fair". Comparing XP, Vista and OSX is better...and "fairer".

The only way to (legally) compare the 3 on "equal" footing is to use Apple hardware.

Shhh....

[coryking]

You'll just make them jelious because on your machine things just work :-)

Re:4.3B last quarter

[ThinkFr33ly]

In fact, the idea that Vista is significantly slower than XP is FUD.

First, I run Vista on three machine, my laptop, my desktop, and my work machine. My laptop is an IBM T42P. Not exactly the fastest machine on earth. (1.8 Ghz, 1GB of ram, 128MB ATI FireGL 2) It runs Vista faster than it ran XP... or, rather, it "feels" faster thanks to things like Readyboost. My "Windows Experience Index" is 3.8.

My desktop is over 2 years old (3.8 Ghz, 2GB of ram, ATI Radeon X850XT), and it runs Vista blazingly fast. The index on this machine is 5.2.

My work machine is a crappy Dell Precision 360 that's about 3.5 years old. It has 2GB of ram, 64MB graphics card, and 3GHz CPU. Vista runs great, and has an index of 4.2.

So there are three machine, all of which are between 2 and 4 years old, and all of which run Vista just fine. Only the work machine doesn't do Aero due to a non-DX9 graphics card.

But that's just my personal experience. So why not look at some real benchmarks done by 3rd parties. They show that Vista is comparable (slightly slower in some cases, slightly faster in others) to XP on the same hardware. In most cases, the benchmarks Vista does worst in are gaming benchmarks. Although we're only talking about 1-2% in most cases, these can be explain by immature drivers. Give it a few months and those drivers will likely be up to par with XP's.

Again, there is a LOT of FUD out there. I can see why it would be hard to sort through.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles

Do you have any fucking clue how DRM works on Windows Vista? It's not some magical happy service that's running all the time. It's integrated into the kernel and into Windows Media Foundation and the Windows Media Framework. Of course, it's integrated into the Kernel and Windows Media Framework on XP too.

XP has many of the same DRM and DRM-esque features as Vista (WGA/Activation, Secure Audio Path, Windows Media DRM, Signed drivers, ICT support). Try playing an HD-DVD on XP with a licensed player and a card/monitor that doesn't support HDCP. Try playing a Region 2 DVD on an XP system where the RPC1 or RPC2 region has been set to Region 1. Try playing a copy of T2 Extreme HD on XP without registering it.

Yes, there are new DRM technologies in Vista. But just like the DRM features in XP or - god forbid - Mac OS X, the solution is obvious: don't buy into bullshit DRM.

I don't have an HD-DVD drive for a very good reason - I don't want to put up with bullshit DRM. Once the DRM has been cracked (truly cracked - not just cracked for movies released prior to date X), I'll consider getting a drive. Until then, I watch plain old DVDs using VLC and my region-hacked drive.

GPU more efficient than CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

So if this was the case, total power usage woul be lower for the task.
Either MS screwed up the unloading of tasks to the GPU, their code for Aero is inefficient, or they aren't properly powering down

Re:GPU more efficient than CPU

[l3v1]

So if this was the case, total power usage woul be lower for the task.

I don't think so. I mean in 2k,xp,2k3 the desktop rendering is the task of the cpu, still, it's around... negligible. In Vista it's far from negligible. That is if you do the same task, Vista would need more juice. Just my $0.02.

How is this news?

[s_p_oneil]

Almost every Vista post has had people mentioning battery life problems, with or without Aero. Here are the main battery-related problems I've encountered personally:

1) Vista's extra behind-the-scenes tasks make your CPU and hard drive work harder.

2) Sleep and hibernate are broken (causing you to waste battery life doing full shutdowns and startups).

3) Aero puts the graphics chip into 3D mode, which makes it rev up to full speed (and full power consumption). The graphics card companies haven't done as much work on their mobile chips to save power as Intel has, especially when it comes to 3D mode.

My laptop's battery life was almost 50% lower in Vista (compared to XP with SP2). I say was because I switched it back to XP.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[coryking]

I agree about FUD.

Indeed I've found the reason for most crappy Vista experiances is a clunker of a Video card. Even on my brand new machine, I've got 5.3+'s on everything but the video card (ATI x1650, 256mb) which is a mere 4.3 for desktop graphics. That is even with catalyst 7.4. I have no idea what Vista must be like with a 5.x card, but it has gotta be sweet :-)

I'd say the most important part of making sure your box is vista ready is the GPU. Without a modern video card, Vista will not get Aero and will hence run like crap. I figure a modern card is anything you can buy at Fry's right now.

Always, always get the latest driver from nVidia or ATI. They are pushing them out monthly these days so check often.

If you have a new card, and it doesn't do Aero out of the box, update the driver and update your experiance index. Dont rely on Windows Update to install the absolute latest driver for you! Once Vista "knows" you've got a modern card, it will automatically turn on Aero once it is done benchmarking your machine.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[blackicye]

the new explorer is a lousy clone of mac osxs pathfinder (basically a clone of the worst features of finder and pathfinder)

I agree with pretty much all the rest of your statements except this one.

I'd argue that pathfinder is at least as crappy as the vista explorer, it probably just doesn't seem that way because you're accustomed to it.

Over my years of computing, I've always gone back to the "Norton Commander" style of file explorer and the slew of clones (more recently Volkov Commander and Total Commander among others) that have come forth as I find them the most efficient, intuitive and lightweight file manager systems. Maybe its the combination of the CLI and dual-panes of browsing, combined with hotkeys.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Overly Critical Guy]

Even if you don't count the deferred sales, Vista did extremely well and *still* beat expectations.

No, it didn't. It's not doing "extremely well" at all. Demand is so low that Dell has reinstated Windows XP on their PCs.

Maybe, just maybe, you're all wrong about Vista. Maybe, just maybe, Vista is a really damn good OS. Stop regurgitating the FUD and try the OS for yourself.

Just because you've bought into the MSDN marketing brochure doesn't mean other people's opinions are "FUD." I've tried Vista. It's not a damn good OS. It's damn shitty. The interface is a hilarious disaster, and the whole thing is much slower. I had so many apps crash that I had to go back to XP.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Overly Critical Guy]

In fact, the idea that Vista is significantly slower than XP is FUD.

No, it's not. Benchmarks have proven that XP is faster. One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.

Again, there is a LOT of FUD out there. I can see why it would be hard to sort through.

Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[MemoryDragon]

Actually I am in your boat, I usually use Total Commander, and Konqueror. Both belong still to the best file managers there are. Total Commander due to its slick but feature rich no eye candy ui, and konqueror to its myriad of features which arent shoved into your eyes. I could never really get used to PathFinder, and after seeing the Vista Explorer I had a Deja Vu of having seen almost everything from it on a mac, then I remembered the short time I tried to get used to Pathfinder!

Re:4.3B last quarter

[coryking]

One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.

If that isn't Fear, Uncertianty, and Doubt I dont know what is pal...

Re:4.3B last quarter

[ThinkFr33ly]

In my previous post I linked to a 3rd party benchmark of Vista that show little if any performance difference between Vista and XP.

I'm sure there are other benchmarks that show different results. But the fact of the matter is that Vista and XP are "close enough" to make the differences meaningless.

Add that to the fact that Vista has features such as ReadyBoost, which can dramatically increase the responsiveness of the machine, and the perf issue is absolute FUD.

Vista is completely usable, and in fact quite enjoyable, even on 4 or 5 year old hardware. That's a fact.

As far as a "Vista dev" saying these things, link to it.

Re:Next up on Slashdot

[un1xl0ser]

fucking lollorz

Re:4.3B last quarter

[R3d M3rcury]

Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term. FUD has been around much longer than Microsoft. It was generally used by IBM to dissuade people from buying non-IBM peripherals to go with their IBM mainframes.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[sofla]

Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.

I'd always heard that the term FUD originated with IBM, since for awhile they were infamous for using FUD tactics to sell mainframes.

fud

[crossmr]

I'm all for MS bashing...but come on with the fud?
It takes more resources, that drains battery life faster. You can turn aero off. I found that playing Company of Heroes drained my battery life faster than having my laptop turned off.
Damn Relic. CURSE THEM!!!!

actual data

[Erpo]

Laptop: Toshiba Tecra S2
Graphics Card: GeForce Go 6600
Operating System: Dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04.

Battery life in Windows XP: 3-4 hours (can't be more exact since I rarely use it)
Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 without compiz: about 3h 30m
Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 with compiz: about 3h 30m

So, compiz doesn't noticeably affect battery life, at least on my hardware.

I invented that!

[Apogaion]

Not having access to a second mouse button drove me crazy when I first bought a Powerbook. The two-fingers-plus-click for a right click was originally my idea. I submitted it as a feature request to the developer of iScroll2 (a trackpad driver that provided two-finger scrolling) in Feb 2005, and he immediately implemented it. I don't know if Apple copied it or invented it independently, but regardless, I now much prefer this approach over having a dedicated second button for the reason you mention.

Mark

Re:I invented that!

[BeerCat]

Well done! 10 out of 10.

I use iScroll2, as my iBook is the one just before Apple introduced it. Excellent.

(even better, not only do you have the ideas, but you also have access to developers who can implement them)

Code Quality.

[twitter]

Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?

Probably because Aqua and X are more efficient than Aero and all the DRM nonsense that M$ has put into Vista. You don't have to do the user any good while you spin their processor. Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome also have nice eye candy without cost to battery life.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[drsmithy]

Although we're only talking about 1-2% in most cases, these can be explain by immature drivers. Give it a few months and those drivers will likely be up to par with XP's.

It's also worth pointing out the typical rule of thumb is that any difference of less than 10% is imperceptible without measuring tools.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[drsmithy]

No, it's not. Benchmarks have proven that XP is faster. One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.

Considering Windows NT didn't even start the *design* phase until 1988, that's hard to believe.

Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.

Firstly, the term was originally coined in reference to IBM.

Secondly, your comment above is a shining example of FUD - negative, vague, likely inaccurate if not an outright fabrication, but still believable by anyone with little to no knowledge of the facts.

Thirdly, the vast majority of the criticism levied against Vista - *especially* on Slashdot - is, similarly, FUD.

Screw all this crap, use Linux

[a1mint]

Using Linux on a Dell 17" laptop. Runs like a train. Who needs that mediocre crap... Linux is better. Yes Linux is better. Yes, it really really really is. It is. No question about it. Is it better.

Re:4.3B last quarter

[xarak]

1. URL to own blog
2. First words in blog entry: "Go Vista"

Where's the "-1 Shameless self-plug" moderation?

Re:4.3B last quarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, keep quoting old facts and numbers. Recently Nvidia came out with their latest drivers for Vista. From their own readme & from real world experience, vista gaming performance is anywhere from 10-20% faster than before. Soooo, if vista was previously running 2-3% slower than XP, it most certainly is not anymore. I'm sure you'll start seeing benchmarks that show a great increase in 3d gaming speed for Vista.

Quit spreading FUD!

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[eiapoce]

Agree. That's the same move I made with DVDs. Wait until DECCS and then move into the technology.

Re:There are more things than aero which drain the

[SEMW]

pushing out jailroots for legacy apps which want admin access was not done by Microsoft, probably due to ignorance, There's certainly ignorance here, but it's not Microsofts'. Go and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control; especially the paragraph about "File and registry virtualization".

Not Entirely True

[MrCrassic]

I have loaded both Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista on my HP Mobile Workstation. With WinXP, I would get about 4.5 hours on a standard battery, and about 5 hours with battery management tools. With Vista, I would get about 3.5 hours of battery life with Aero on, but after installing the same battery management tools, I would easily get about 5 hours of battery life under the same conditions.

I have even read reports about people getting MORE battery life under Windows Vista in comparison to WinXP. I believe it is all a matter of the hardware on your laptop and how well your company supports Vista with it.

If anyone has similar experiences, please discuss.

Re:Aero problem is easy to fix...

[OffBeatMammal]

Clint got fed up with the bitchin' and produced a neat little app to make the problem go away - have a look here for the app (and source) http://betterthaneveryone.com/?p=517 I tweaked it a little to add an easy on/off switch for aero at any time - until Clint integrates the changes it's available at http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/blogs/obm/archive/20 07/05/09/better-battery-life.aspx

Re:Aero problem is easy to fix...

[s_p_oneil]

Now that is news! The editors should scrap this article and put your post on the front page. It won't help me at all because my laptop can't run Aero (and Vista still hogs the battery), but it's still good to know.

I feel that Slashdot has much better articles than Digg because the stories are filtered by editors, but that doesn't prevent me from wanting to smack them around for things like this. Sometimes they're almost as bad as CNN when it comes to beating a subject to death. ;-)

Re:Aero problem is easy to fix...

[OffBeatMammal]

:) I like /. although it's very anti-MS and I happen to use a lot of MS tech for choice. I'm so glad there's folks like Clint around who go find solutions to the problems instead of posting 377 times that Vista sux - helps keep me sane, and hopefully reminds folks that there's hooks in Win32 to make a lot of clever stuff (fairly) easy to write...