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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."
At least last time I tried to run Vista on my MBP, part of the problem was Apple drivers that weren't optimized for power saving. The processor ran at full speed all the time (where on OS X it used SpeedStep) and the HD would never spin down. Thus I don't know how much of the fault is Microsoft's and how much is Apple's.
With that in mind, I got about 60% the battery life from Vista that I got from OS X.
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?
The one thing I will agree to is that Apple notebooks have some of the best battery lives I've seen.
:)
Everytime I've used an iBook or a Powerbook, I'm amazed at how long the battery lasts. While some other brands (e.g. Dell) have decent battery life compared to others (e.g. HP and Toshiba, at least in my experience), I'm always knocked off by Apple notebooks' battery life.
Now if only Apple notebooks had two mouse buttons instead of hacks around it.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but who cares....
Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!
What this power consumption business really means is hardware manufacturers need to optimize the parts of the GPU that Vista uses so they consume less power. In a year, new "Vista-Ready" laptops will probably use the same, if not significantly less power than their XP optimized counterparts. Less power you say? Hell yeah! Vista has all kinds of goodies for power management that didn't exist in XP; my desktop computer now suspends itself to... something.. after 5 minutes and will instantly wake up. Dunno if XP could that, but it sure as hell didn't on mine. It was default behavior on my Vista install.
Further, Aero is definitly not eye candy and I'd even argue that it is the first version of Windows that *doesn't* have eye candy. The user interface is crisp, snappy, and far more elegant than anything before it. You barely notice the OS is even there; XP & 95 are very "in your face". I personally love Vista - I dare say that when running on proper hardware it really makes you feel the PC has come of age. All prior windows versions feel clunky in comparison.
I'd like to add that everyone who bought XP earlier this year got a "free" upgrade to Vista... I know because I was one of them. However, while I paid the shipping and handling to get it ($10), it's sitting in a drawer unused. I wonder how many of those there were, because I'm sure they were counted, too.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The fine folks at the Tech Report did a report on this months ago and found the difference between Aero and non-Aero was only about a watt. They don't disprove that Vista uses more power than XP, but I'd say they prove Aero isn't the culprit if that's the case. Oh and I at least trust the Tech Report guys - ZD Net hasn't inspired a lot of confidence lately. http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10945
I'm drawing my conclusions about Vista based on personal experience. I've been running it since the day it was released on MSDN in November '06.
I read these "reviews" online, which are so completely off base and inaccurate, I'm not surprised so many people think Vista is a steaming pile.
But the fact of the matter is that virtually all of the complaints about Vista are easily debunked. Whether it's the DRM FUD, the performance FUD, the "Vista is just a pretty face on XP" FUD, the "UAC is popping up CONSTANTLY" FUD, or any of the other baloney I've read.
Is Vista perfect? Hell no. But the minor issues it has are dwarfed by how much better it is than XP in virtually every way.
What I'd like is a way to do this in power manager.. I really like Aero and the other glitz... but I'd like it turn off at x% remaining battery if it's going to cost me battery time. Personally I'm running it on a brand new laptop so I have no comparison, and I'm far too lazy to make all the adjustments and see if it changes.