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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[SirTalon42]

Let me guess, you have an ATI video card?

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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.

'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: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.

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: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.

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

[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.