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Windows Drains MacBook's Battery; Who's To Blame?

Posted by timothy on from the pox-on-both-your-houses dept.

ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."

3 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Not just Windows by dr.newton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have a MBP 5.1, one with both the on-board and discrete Nvidia cards. OS X switches between them depending on whether it is going for power savings or performance.

    The drivers for Windows XP and Linux do not seem to have this ability. When I'm doing nothing but surfing, I get about 4.5 hours of battery life in OS X, but only about 2.1 hours in Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty) and Windows XP.

    I always assumed it was the inability of XP and Linux to switch to the on-board graphics card.

    --
    Just another proletarian malcontent.
    1. Re:Not just Windows by lukas84 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have a ThinkPad W500, which has onboard Intel graphics or a Ati Radeon 3650. They too can be switched automatically or at will.

      The reason you can't do it on XP is because Apple hasn't bothered to release drivers for it.

  2. Can we question the author's qualifications? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FTFA: Other than that, Windows 7 has been working great on my MacBook Pro... It looks good, too, even prettier than when it is installed on PC hardware.

    This reminds me of the iPod Nano review here at Slashdot that claimed that the Nano sounded great, even in a moving convertible with the top down. (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/08/1439244)

    Yes, it's the Apple magic that makes the software look better.

    How can we know that the battery isn't simply returning strange battery level information to the OS that OSX knows how to parse but Windows doesn't? What a strange review.