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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."
processor intensive process uses more energy. turn it off. duh.
The last time someone posted a question about "How long", it was answered in the first post.
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Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac, or I'd do it. But maybe this counts: http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/reviews/index.cfm?r
Layne
That's like saying you're expecting great savings from a fuel management system on a V12 Aston Martin.
and Microsoft's marketing team would still sell it by the bundles.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Vista is trying to drain your laptop's battery. Cancel or Allow?
I would have had first post, but I had to plug in my laptop.
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.
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.
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.
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
Whenever you mouse over it, or anything basically happens with it your cpu gets spiked. I'd be interested in seeing if disabling the sidebar helps with battery life. Someone should also compare if certain widgets are causing problems.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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...
I don't know about notebook users, but when I purchased and installed Vista, Aero was not initially running. I had to go select it from the Themes area of the Display control panel.
So when they write the following:
Seems like more of an issue with educating users. Although, maybe someone will develop a miserly mobile GPU that's optimized for what Aero does.
Finally, this part of the article is a bit screwy:
I don't think the study implies that. It just says that application load time is unaffected. Aero's going to draw more power through the GPU even when applications are not being loaded...
Why don't you Read that article? MSFT deferred ALL Vista sales from October 2006 to the first quarter.
So everyone who bought a PC for christmas and got a Vista voucher is also counted in that list. So all those Vista Business sales only got counted in the first quarter.
PC sales are down, how can Vista Sales be sky high? maybe because MSFT counted 1.5 quarters of vista sales in one quarter. what they did is technically legal, but one can't judge Vista sales by it because of what they did. As it artificially inflates the numbers.
Lets see who they do in this quarter. Especially with Dell selling XP machines again.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
according to Tom's Hardware. There is no difference in power consumption between XP and Vista w/ Aero.
>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.
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.
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 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!!!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The same happened with the transition to Mac OS X. Although they have improved power management with the various upgrades, on my old tibook G4 I could get a half hour or more extra battery life running mac os Classic than I could in OS X.
Vista is a Pinto with a jet engine mounted on it backwards, painted Zune Brown, with a dealer-installed decal on the side that says "XTREME!!!"
:)
Note: not a troll nor flamebait; just having fun here with the analogy.
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.
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.
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.
Vista (with Aero) battery life, under normal conditions, is about 2/3 of the battery life that I get when running OS X on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. I've noticed that Vista does have very good CPU power-savings; it doesn't use full processing power until it is necessary. What I can't figure out is why XP/Vista makes the MacBook Pro run so much hotter. OS X definitely has the higher RAM usage, and CPU usage is nearly the same, yet OS X runs cool and quiet while both Windows installations I've had run warmer. Maybe it's a driver inefficiency or something... it also did this on a Core Duo MacBook I owned. Hmm.
-William Brendel
When you go on batter power the power settings switch to "power saver", by default.
The "power saver" profile turns off Aero, although keeps desktop compositioning enabled. (I think.)
The article wasn't clear on whether or not it was the Aero theme (with all the pretty transparencies) or the desktop compositioning, that was causing the power drain.
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
the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles
Look, I know that DRM is really unpopular, but could we not have absolutely ridiculously stupid assertions like this that DRM is affecting everyting "left and right" and is somehow running down the battery in a noticeable way?
Sheesh.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Here is a quote from Paul Thurrott's analysis: Allow me to predict one of the weak complaints Vista bashers will make about Microsoft's financial results: They'll charge that Microsoft's earnings last quarter were artificially inflated because the company previously deferred revenue from the free and low-cost Vista upgrades offered during the 2006 holiday season. So is it true? According to Microsoft, the company deferred $1.67 billion in revenue from the last calendar quarter of 2006 until the first calendar quarter of 2007, or about $1.14 billion in profits. But even without that one-time gain, Microsoft's revenue would have been up 17 percent. More to the point, the slice of the pie that Windows is responsible for would have still jumped a whopping 30 percent. Microsoft CFO Christopher P. Liddell said that regardless of trends, sales of Vista were $300 million to $400 million higher than the company's internal projections. Sales of Office 2007 were about $200 million higher than expected. You claim that PC sales are down, and indeed they were down, until Vista hit the market. Vista caused a complete reversal in the PC sales trend. This is even more surprising since Microsoft missed the holiday window for the Vista release.
So despite the best efforts of many people in the media, and certainly Slashdot, The Register, and similar anti-MS sites, Vista has done extremely well. My bet is that it would have done even better if all this FUD wasn't being spread.
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.
From what I've gathered about Vista, XP outperforms it in that respect, also.
I would never pay for it, but I got this OS parody via MSDN for free, so I gave it a try. Sure, it ate my batteries, but this was not the worst. Try this: 1. Plug in a mouse, then "shut" the laptop. Vista goes standby 2. Remove the mouse. Whenever I did this, Vista started the cpu fan (swooooooosh), showed the desktop (I guess, it was shut, but you could see "light"), played the "USB Device unplugged sound", and went back to standby. I don't know if this has been fixed in the meantime, but this was one major reason to switch back to xp. I won't try vista again until service pack 5 or so.
...should read "Vista Eating Life". I know a part of me dies everytime I hear about Vista.
I get approximately 30-45 minutes (unscientifically tested) more battery life from OS X.
What boggles my mind the most of all is that Vista has no provision for automatically disabling the Aero interface based on the power source. I'm sure the power disparity would go away if Aero would disable itself as soon as I switched over to battery power. As example: I can hear a fan (presumably GPU) kick into high gear just sitting on the desktop doing nothing. To me that is completely ridiculous and Microsoft should be investigating a way to fix it.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
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.
I recently purchased a Fujitsu P7230. I couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax, even though I was going to run Ubuntu, so I got Vista Home Basic, which was the cheapest option available. I used it for a few weeks before installing Ubuntu, so I could learn about Vista. I might not use Vista full-time, but it would be a good experience. Besides, if I have to pay for it, I'm going to get something out of it.
The P7230 is an ultraportable laptop with incredible battery life. If you fill both battery bays and enable CPU frequency scaling, you can run it for 8 hours without plugging it in. In Vista without Aero (which this machine can't really handle anyway), I would get up to 11 hours of battery life. In Ubuntu I can maybe get 9. I still use Ubuntu full-time, but don't tell me that Vista has worse battery life. Turn off your useless eye-candy if you care about your battery. I'm sure beryl would kill my battery life even worse.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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.
Do you have any fucking clue how DRM works on Windows Vista? It's not some magical happy service that's running all the time. It's integrated into the kernel and into Windows Media Foundation and the Windows Media Framework. Of course, it's integrated into the Kernel and Windows Media Framework on XP too.
XP has many of the same DRM and DRM-esque features as Vista (WGA/Activation, Secure Audio Path, Windows Media DRM, Signed drivers, ICT support). Try playing an HD-DVD on XP with a licensed player and a card/monitor that doesn't support HDCP. Try playing a Region 2 DVD on an XP system where the RPC1 or RPC2 region has been set to Region 1. Try playing a copy of T2 Extreme HD on XP without registering it.
Yes, there are new DRM technologies in Vista. But just like the DRM features in XP or - god forbid - Mac OS X, the solution is obvious: don't buy into bullshit DRM.
I don't have an HD-DVD drive for a very good reason - I don't want to put up with bullshit DRM. Once the DRM has been cracked (truly cracked - not just cracked for movies released prior to date X), I'll consider getting a drive. Until then, I watch plain old DVDs using VLC and my region-hacked drive.
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.
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.
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The Radeon is underclocked in firmware. It is 'slow' in both OS X and Windows. I use ATITool to "re-clock" it when playing games, but otherwise leave it underclocked in Windows.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
In my previous post I linked to a 3rd party benchmark of Vista that show little if any performance difference between Vista and XP.
I'm sure there are other benchmarks that show different results. But the fact of the matter is that Vista and XP are "close enough" to make the differences meaningless.
Add that to the fact that Vista has features such as ReadyBoost, which can dramatically increase the responsiveness of the machine, and the perf issue is absolute FUD.
Vista is completely usable, and in fact quite enjoyable, even on 4 or 5 year old hardware. That's a fact.
As far as a "Vista dev" saying these things, link to it.
Sometimes moderators think something is particularly humourous (or are just plain overzealous on groupthink) so they mod Insightful instead of Funny, as Funny does not grant a karma bonus.
I run Vista on my MacBook Pro. It eats battery life about twice as quickly as Mac OS when Aero Glass is running. That said, it has much better results on friends' computers, which are designed to run Windows.
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?
Probably because Aqua and X are more efficient than Aero and all the DRM nonsense that M$ has put into Vista. You don't have to do the user any good while you spin their processor. Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome also have nice eye candy without cost to battery life.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.