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Vista Eating Battery Life

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the glutton-for-power dept.

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."

9 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Hmmm by ProppaT · · Score: 4, Insightful


      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!

      --
      Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
  2. Re:Obligatory Slashdot car analogy by jeevesbond · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
  3. No suprise here - same for XGL or AIGLX by GroundBounce · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:AMD64 by Kythe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

    Kythe
  5. Disk indexing by Shados · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  6. Re:AMD64 by MontyApollo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >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.

  7. Oh FFS by Cervantes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
  8. Re:The last time.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.