Slashdot Mirror
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."
The last time someone posted a question about "How long", it was answered in the first post.
e viewid=2215
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?r
Layne
Newer linux kernels will support "dynticks" that might slightly extend a laptop's battery life.
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.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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:
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:
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...
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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.
according to Tom's Hardware. There is no difference in power consumption between XP and Vista w/ Aero.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
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.
nice nick...
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.
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.
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.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.