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

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

[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: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: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.