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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."
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.
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?
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
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 am now running LongHorn Server Beta 3 on my notebook, running as a standard user. Glass and Sidebar are not even available, and my battery life seems to have gone up significantly, I assume because fewer processes are running. IE is hardened on server and it is certainly more secure. And yes, I have enabled the wireless functionality and search indexer. My desktop does look much like Win 2K.
Security tends to go up as you run less functionality. It appears that battery life does so as well.
>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.
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 would note that locked down as it its, it does break a lot of web sites. Paranoid as I am, I typically have explicit distrust keys for Flash and I disable all multimedia to avoid parser errors.
That test is severely flawed.
First off, it's a desktop, measured at the AC adapter. If a standard laptop took 150W, then the battery would only last 20 minutes. Clearly, laptops take less power overall and the differences caused by the CPU's load will be amplified.
Second, it measures the power at only two points - no load and full load. I suspect that no-load between XP and vista is about the same because they are basically doing nothing. You need a real-use benchmark to compare the two.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
From what I've gathered about Vista, XP outperforms it in that respect, also.
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.