Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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
  3. 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...

  4. 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.

  5. 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.