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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror is trying to figure out why the battery life for devices running Windows is so much worse than similar (or identical) devices running other operating systems. For example, the Surface Pro 2 made great strides over the original Surface Pro, increasing web-browsing battery life by 42%, but it still lags far behind Android and iOS tablets. The deficit doesn't get any better when Windows is run on Apple hardware. Atwood says, 'Microsoft positions Windows 8 as an operating system that's great for tablets, which are designed for casual web browsing and light app use – but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition's desktop operating system in OS X – much less their tablet and phone operating system, iOS?' Anand Lal Shimpi is perplexed, too. Atwood is now reaching out to the community for answers: 'None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X. And that battery life gap is worse today – even when using Microsoft's own hardware, designed in Microsoft's labs, running Microsoft's latest operating system released this week. Microsoft can no longer hand wave this vast difference away based on vague references to "poorly optimized third party drivers." ... I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power.'"
...because it's old and bloated!
Windows sucks power?
No my friend, Windows just sucks.
Watch the WWDC sessions on power management in iOS and Mac OS X. You'll get an idea of how much work Apple put into this over the last decade or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
... film @ 11.
Sheer love of evil! Seriously, though - all the massive background processes. Probably a decades-old stack of services and whatnot they don't have the corporate continuity to be able to change at this point.
Ah ha: "I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power."
You make the mistake of thinking that just because the device isn't doing something at the user's direction, that it is idle. How do you think the NSA is getting all of their number crunching done while they shake the bugs out of their Utah data center?
That they just don't give a shit? If they prioritised it, it would indeed be better.
...and android is tailored for power savings on mobile devices.
I have a surface pro, it doesn't have fantastic battery life but I can get a hell of a lot more number
crunching done on a charge than on an android tablet. Mind you I bought it for use as a mobile
photo/video editing tool, if all you need is a web browser then you don't need a full featured OS.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
It's the difference between running super low wattage ARM tablet processors and desktop class processors with better power management. You don't see iPads running crysis 3 natively yet, so why is it surprising that the much faster processor take more juice?
I've always been aware of Windows almost constantly accessing the hard drive on a desktop system, I would imagine constantly accessing flash storage will also have a detrimental effect.
iOS has some pretty strict rules for background applications which are designed to improve the battery life, I can't imagine Windows is anywhere near as brutal.
I am not aware of a phone yet that can run more than one operating system. Comparing a windows phone to an iPhone is a pretty useless thing to do as their hardware is quite a bit different.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Much like Jay Leno, they've built up a LOT of legacy bloat over the decades.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
6.8 hours is enough battery life for anyone.
Microsoft's answer to the blue screen of death was to reboot the OS in the background while preserving the screen so that the user doesn't get pissed.
1) M. 2) I. 3) C. 4) R. 5) O. 6) S. 7) O. 8) F. 9) T.
Why do Windows 8 tablets running on an Intel i5 x86 CPU have lower battery life than tablets running ARM processors with restricted multitasking? I wonder..
Seriously, Windows 8 tablets running on Intel Atom CPUs manage to meet or exceed battery life targets made by Apple's iPad. I think that's pretty fucking impressive myself.
But I forget, this is Slashdot.
Disable the Superfetch service. All it does is kill your battery by producing unnecessary disk activity and filling memory with the contents of files you're not even using.
Someone should introduce them to my laptop running linux!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The fact that you can do two things at once doesn't mean that you have to do lost of pointless work all the time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A few questions that would be interesting to know the answers to:
- Is the power consumption deficiency the same across all hardware or does it close the gap on certain pieces of hardware?
- Is the consumption deficiency gap the same on tablets vs laptops vs PCs?
- How much can Windows 8 be tweaked to save battery life (IE: disabled unneeded services)?
- Does it manage power of certain pieces of hardware better than others (SSD vs HDD, AMD vs Intel)?
- Do drivers make a difference in power consumption?
- How many hamsters have heart attacks every time Windows 8 is benchmarked?
There is no other reason to it.
Windows is terrible at power management, terrible at memory management, terrible at idle processing, terrible at BEING idle, writes log files CONSTANTLY, does so much stupid shit in the background all the time, stuff you usually cannot disable even from administration programs in the OS that needs to be disabled from tweaking programs and the like, etc.
Windows is just filled with crap LITERALLY NO SINGLE PERSON WANTS but Microsoft.
Windows won't be good until they ditch Windows and rewrite it entirely.
Fuck developers, get with the times, most devs code is terrible and ancient as it is, usually with a few tweaks to make it work on Win Vis7a onwards. (RT can get wrecked though)
These are the devs that have flooded our registry with crap, that have flooded out documents with crap, that have flooded our program settings / data folders with nonsense and worse, destroyed the desktop of over a billion people.
They don't deserve a hand being held. They should be left to walk on the road alone. Hopefully they get hit.
I have no sympathy for developers with terrible code practices. There is "working code" and "production code", don't mix them!
MS's new OS is a single-OS to rule them all, and at it's heart, it IS a desktop operating system (Metro-UI notwithstanding). Desktops are plugged in 24/7 so power management has (always) been an afterthought. It will take some heavy-lifting on MS's part to start to dig into that area (or more likely, create that area) of code to start to truly address pluggless-battery-operated devices.
Why does Firefox still hog the CPU at 99% just sitting there? Why does my RC airplaine simulator hog the CPU at 99% when I minimize it?
Funny you should mention Symbian - my S^3 phones had the best battery life of any of my smartphones, regardless of platform, without having larger batteries than their iOS/Android/Windows Phone counterparts.
Comparing Android or iOS on ARM to Windows (or OSX or Linux) on a full i386 platform is simply meaningless. Why do it?
The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life pretty much answers its own question.
Surface pro and surface pro 2 completely destroy everything else in the benchmark ratings. It means haswell doesn't manage lower power scenarios nearly as well as ARM, but Intel never has.
For a comparison to iOS they'd need to well, actually have on on their chart. I can certainly see the argument that Windows is worse at power management than other OS's on the same hardware - but without hard numbers in a chart that's a tough case to make, since you're comparing different review sites to each other. Comparing different hardware is missing out on a lot - for most computing needs they're benchmarking Haswell is massive overkill - which might just be it, it literally cannot slow itself down enough (with either MS or intel drivers being the culprit) to save even more power.
Or windows is doing background stuff that other OS's aren't. Whether those provide any value to justify reduced battery life or not is debatable, but the answer seems to be 'probably not'.
It still isn't 'microsofts hardware', it's hardware from some 3rd party vendor they soldered together in a case and put their own sticker on it. Yes, it's up to MS to try and ride the cases of Intel and whomever is supplying their displays and SSD's to find ways to save power, but it's ultimately up to the 3rd party guys (who also sell parts to the rest of us) to actually make the drivers for their hardware.
It's the difference between running super low wattage ARM tablet processors and desktop class processors with better power management. You don't see iPads running crysis 3 natively yet, so why is it surprising that the much faster processor take more juice?
Right there in the summary:
...but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition's desktop operating system in OS X [...]None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X.
Literally. Microsoft touts all the capabilities built into Windows as advantages. The software and services to do all that are integrated into Windows. They aren't easy to remove. And the more things you have running, the more work the box has to do (even when it's idle, those services are still working in the background) and the more power it consumes. Android, OTOH, doesn't have all those services integrated into the OS, and it's a lot easier to remove unneeded services when they're separate components that you can just take out of the startup scripts.
I know that my virus scanning service seems to be running at 2-5% most of the time. And, my process list looks a mile long.
I think we expect our windows devices to be real computers and load them up with full applications. Then, we expect them to sip juice like Android. Can't comment on the OSX. My netbook on linux is 5 years old and doesn't have much of a battery left.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
You know when you tell your boss, "but, clearly I cannot make EVERYTHING happen in the release this week!" Well, this is the same thing.
Everybody wants everything to be their top priority in every release. Blowhards complain that improved power management is not a 'feature' that they'd pay for; meanwhile, other pundits complain that Microsoft is on its last legs because they keep prioritizing touch-based compatibility above things that people are willing to pay for (like power management).
The last time Microsoft made a company-wide concerted effort to tackle a problem, the result is still widely deployed a decade later and critics complain about it every day (Windows XP Service Pack 2 with its built-in firewall and antivirus technology as part of its Secure Programming initiatives).
So ask yourself this: Do you really want Windows 9 to be the next Windows XP (that gets installed and never upgraded from) or do you want more cowbells?
Like spell checking.
They're comparing windows on x86 vs OS X on x86.
You say you are comparing on the same hardware, but there is no hardware in common for all the OSes you state. Sure, there is the option to run windows on a Mac that normally runs OSX, but that's hindered by 3rd party drivers, so it's not a fair comparison. Comparing windows to IOS that runs on a totally different processor architecture even, isn't close to a fair comparison. Comparing WindowsRT to IOS may run on the same architecture, but again, no identical hardware where both are optimized for.
I'm no windows fanboy, but right now, you're just not making sense with your comparison. Windows isn't bad at power usage. It may not be great, but it's not meant to be as energy efficient as the phone/tablet OSes and the hardware it's running on isn't meant to be as efficient either. Compare WindowsRT to apple or Android devices with similar hardware specs and battery size and then you may have a point. I seriously doubt you'll see a big difference there, but if you do, please come back and tell us all about that.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Chewing up all your CPU.
(Yes, this post is a joke. It's an (in)famous old article from everyone's favorite tech writer -- who was, in fact, being serious.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
For those of you who didn't click the article link, do so now. At the beginning there's a chart that shows a comparison of some of the most popular tablets in regards to there battery life when web browsing over WIFI. When you look at the Surface 2(not the pro), it's scores right in between the Galaxy Tab 3 and the Nexus 10, being only 0.10 an hour shorter than the Nexus 10.
Putting the Surface Pro on that list and saying it's Microsoft's fault is wrong.
Only on Apple hardware, which requires Apple drivers for power management, and surprise surprise, Apple sucks at Windows drivers (and always has). In one particular, the Windows power management drivers for my friend's MBP don't suppose variable fan speed control. It always runs full speed. No shit, that's going to waste battery life... On the flip side of the coin, though, Hackintoshes get worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware. This entire "article" is stupid; anybody who isn't blinded by fanboyism and has used the systems in question could tell you that.
Surface Pro [2] has worse battery life than an iPad or Android tablet for a simple and bloody obvious reason: Core i5 CPU. Not some power-sipping little ARM chip with passive cooling, but full laptop-grade 64-bit processor. Even completely leaving aside the obvious (to anybody who is not an idiot, which apparently excludes the submitter) differences between a desktop OS (Win8.x) and a mobile one (Android or iOS), there are very obvious reasons for the battery life difference.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
We don't have to.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You say you are comparing on the same hardware, but there is no hardware in common for all the OSes you state.
Doesn't matter. There is no comparison between disjointed hardware and software on one side, and Apple's start-to-end products on the other. That's what this is about, not how everything out there compares directly. It's also why Apple is able to deliver such stellar battery life across the board.
So much so, that when I fire up XP it goes into TURBOFAN MODE and CPU temps still climb into nutsack-roasting level. 90 to 100 C for the CPU temps (Core2 Duo) have occurred without too much heavy lifting. So forget about the battery life, there is no use without the power cord. It's more an issue to be concerned with the physical limits of the rest of the hardware, like when does it melt?
Read down a little further, he compares an MBA and a Surface Pro 2 running anad's wifi web browsing benchmark. The hardware is very similar, but the MBA lasts about twice as long.
Comparing operating systems running different hardware is a meaningless endeavor.
Comparing on the same hardware is better until you take the logical leap of drawing general conclusions from it.
When you use the conclusions above to draw additional conclusions about what you think would happen your ability to predict or be taken seriously takes a hit.
My 5 year old lenovo draws ~7 watts on battery with the 14" display on and 7200 RPM platter spinning. I am able to observe consumption difference from battery manager in detail when I turn hardware on and off.. run applications..etc.
The answer is likely knowable if only there was willingness to spend more time (thinking), measuring and working the problem and less time (talking) drawing conclusions.
" I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power.'"
Because MS doesn't pay reviewers to write about the bad stuff.
Errm, what article are you reading? Because the one I see shows the Haswell-powered 13" MBA getting ~14 hours of battery life to the Surface Pro 2's ~7 hours of battery life. Sure, the 13" MBA has a bigger battery, but the 11" MBA has a smaller battery and still gets ~11 hours.
Your arguments about the Surface Pro 2 not really being microsoft hardware are not really meaningful, you could say the same about Apple's notebooks. They don't make the CPU, or the GPU, or the SSD controller, or the screen, or the display controller, etc.
Comparing a Surface Pro to an iPad is about as useful as comparing a bus to a small car. Of course the small car uses less fuel, but I'd like to see a bus full of people crammed into said car.
The iPad and the tablets that it inspired are the new netbooks: barely useful for anything beyond simple tasks.
The Surface Pro and similar tablets are ultabooks stuffed into tablets - this has advantages and disadvantages.
As for OS X, that is indeed somewhat misterious, but it probably boils down to:
- Driver optimizations: having a very limited set of hardware that needs to be supported makes it much easier to optimize drivers (and if needed the OS itself).
- Bloatware: my Ativ Smart PC Pro came with at least three Samsung applications that constantly run in the background and (way too often) interact with the user. Control panel thingies for this and that driver don't help, either. Some of those probably misbehave and screw up the scheduler enough to measurably reduce idle time. These are not present on OS X.
- UI: I'm not sure just how much hardware acceleration OS X uses, but Windows Vista/7 with Aero and Windows 8 at all times have hardware accelerated graphics for their UIs - eye candy in exchange for power consumption.
- Unusually low-power hardware: I can imagine Apple applying pressure for individual components' power consumption to be lowered - the screen comes to mind as a likely culprit.
Wouldn't you want to be shut down? The shame of it all.
Way to logical response for /.
(1) there is so much cruft under the surface in Windows (fake DOS calls, umpteen levels of virtualism, etc) that the machine expends a ton of cycles doing what is NOP in newer systems not supporting 1980 calls.
(2) optimization isn't pretty and doesn't sell, so Microsoft is not cleaning house.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Defragging a potentially huge disk, in the background, on-the-fly, so the disk never slows down.
File search index, in the background, on-the-fly, so you can search faster. You can turn this off.
Full window dragging, and many other graphics enhancements. You can turn these off.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Port polling, did you know that a USB port might gett polled 50'000 times per second? You can turn this down. A lot.
Scheduled tasks. Oh so many scheduled tasks. You probably have over 1'000 defined.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
An actual software Firewall. You can turn it off, or make it much simpler.
Multi-user, multi-profile. Everything gets doubled.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
Event logging. Windows knows what it's doing, because it takes the time to write it down.
The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system. It's incredibly fast, always-on, used tens of thousands of times in a single moment by a any application -- my graphics suite writes 12'000 registry entries when I close the application. And you never need to worry about it getting corrupted.
No fewer than eight different scripting languages available at any moment.
Twenty versions of a single DLL loaded concurrently, for cross-decade application compatibility.
It's not just an operating system. It's a generic operating system that can run anything from decades ago. My 1985 application still runs on my vista machine, which is still running smoothly 7 years after I built it, and now it's running software 7 years newer than it is. iOS doesn't do that. Neither does OS X. Neither does Android.
But there's always been a version of windows with better battery life. It used to be called XP embedded. And it was exactly what you expected it to be -- you got to just start turning off huge parts of windows. You're welcome to do it. No, you don't want to. You don't want things to be slower, and you don't want to lose all of those great features. And many are tied together.
And that's why you chose a windows machine in the first place. Not because it does the bare minimum, and hence saves battery life, but because it does everything it's always done at a reasonable battery life.
But hey. If you want to complain about power vs features, I want you to look at my tvision's on-screen menu system. Now it's a smart tv, with a menu of icons to all sorts of dumb shit. And yet, just scrolling through those pages of icons is slower than my speak'n'spell. My tvision is plugged into the wall, with as much power as it wants. The led light bulb consumes more power than the computer running the on-screen menu. Why? I have no idea. But it also doesn't have a pre-amp, so I can't plug in any headphones or larger speakers without an optical cable and a home theatre amp/receiver. Thanks for that.
Moreover, the Sony Vaio Pro has a higher-resolution screen than the MBA, which puts the Vaio at a disadvantage (because it drains the battery a little faster). So with highly-optimized Windows drivers, the battery life looks the same or even better for Windows.
The comparison to ARM is just stupid. Obviously battery life is better on ARM, at the cost of much lower performance. That's true for Windows and OS X both.
This happens because you don't have the correct Intel thermal profile driver installed. There won't be any unknown devices in Device Manager, but you still need to install it or you will see the behaviour you are getting in Windows.
Intel allowed manufacturers using C2D processors to customize the thermal profile of the CPU based on what their hardware was capable of. That's how very thin and light laptops were able to use high end CPUs without overheating, but limiting the amount they can ramp up CPU speeds and voltages, particularly when both cores are loaded or the GPU is also active.
Apple must provide the correct drivers, tailored to their laptops. Presumably you can download them from somewhere.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Windows virtual memory subsystem swaps pages to disk regardless of physical memory availability due to facilitate the memory dump facilities used for storing crash reports and sending those reports to Microsoft. This would mean that the hard drive is being used a lot more than other operating systems and therefore would draw more power. Shutting off the swap file in Windows typically provides a 30% performance increase (assuming sufficient physical memory). It would be interesting to test if shutting offers an improvement in battery life.
There are lots of posts here claiming that they aren't using like to like comparisons. The point of the post isn't that an iPhone is getting better battery life than a MS Exchange Server, the point of the article is that in almost every scenario you can match up, Android/iOS/OS X comes out clearly ahead. And this is the case regardless of what hardware or type of hardware you're comparing. Put Windows on a MacBook and it's going to get lower battery life... a-ha, it's a driver issue, you say, ok, but spec out a similar PC notebook and it will have lower battery life than the MacBook.
In other words, Microsoft doesn't have a battery life on the Surface RT or any other product problem, Microsoft has a battery life problem. Why is that?
Surface vs. MBA is still a largely meaningless comparison. To know if there's a real difference, you need to compare Win8 and OSX on the same machine. But this has been brought up before, though not in the context of Win8 and tablets. It's fairly certain that Windows is chewing up a lot of power doing something even on low-power chips, though what nobody seems to know.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
dude, do you even reverse-engineer?!
I see you spoutin' off the same damn "math is harddddd" bullshit further upthread. If you don't know what you're talking about, just get out.
Just because we weren't magically gifted with the source for some code by the open source unicorn doesn't mean that these things can't be analyzed. It just takes a bit more determination to pin things down.
There's people out there that do that sort of thing, some for a living, some as a perverse hobby. Just because you don't understand how it can be done doesn't mean it's impossible.
Apple wrote ios for devices with batteries in mind from day one.
It is slowing getting close to OSX, but they have to be careful.
Microsoft chose the "one O/S everywhere" serving needs of desktop
and devices at the same time. This was a naive approach.
It has been awhile since I've tried serious measurements on MS-Windows, but a high interrupt load could easily cause trouble. If frequent enough, the CPU cannot cycle down to a low-power state (1000s of clocks) even if the processing required is minimal.
Something like OS attention for all the broadcast packets (especially bad with NetBIOS) could increase the interrupt load from 100-1000/s to several orders of magnitude more.
The deficit doesn't get any better when Windows is run on Apple hardware.
Perhaps because the Apple hardware that can run Windows is barely any different than the hardware from Dell or HP. The case for these PCs might be a different shape but the processors, RAM, chipset, etc are close to identical for all practical purposes. 99% of the functional difference between a Dell and an Apple is in the software. One would expect the experience of running Windows on an Apple computer to be pretty darn similar to running on a similarly spec'd Dell.
...Constantly babbling with NSA servers !
Windows is just a shitty OS!
My Nexus 4 phone barely lasts my work day. My iPad needs to be charged every day. I can get a few days out of my Nexus 10 unless I even touch a game. About the only device that lasts the week is my iPod Touch, but then I use it mostly as my alarm clock.
I think this is a pretty universal problem. Batteries have not kept up to the demand of CPU performance required by our devices, period.
Of course with relevance to article. when the author realizes that Surface Pro is a laptop (i.e. PC ) and iPad is a device built from phone hardware maybe he might realize how stupid the question was.
It would be more relevant to compare Surface Pro to MacBooks and ask how Macbooks can last the day while Surface Pro won't last more then a few hours.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
From a marketer's point of view, Microsoft would be stupid to cut the bloat, at least to do it at any praiseworthy pace.
The empire-builder impulse is to Microsoft products what the Apple fans (however you describe those) are to Apple products: the companies have found their market. Boys are born liking big, impressive, loud and powerful machines, they like challenging (whether or not valuable) intricacy, they like always having a next conquest. Whatever else, Microsoft has been about that for a long, long time. The devotees of the empire-builder impulse love them for it. If they suddenly deliver a machine that doesn't, from that point of view, do anything, it won't be just seen as a slap in the face, that's exactly what it'll be.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
yes i did that already
It's just programmed that way.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
There's ample evidence showing that Windows has substantially lower battery life than OS X even when running on the same hardware. I've personally experienced this myself (I've got a 2013 MBA), albeit with Windows 7 rather than 8. The point here is that even when Microsoft has full control over the hardware going into the machine (the Surface Pro 2), the battery life is still substantially worse than comparable hardware running OS X.
I don't think there's really much debate about the fact that Windows battery life is poor, and I'm not even sure that the reason why it's poor is important: hopefully the negative press about it will prompt Microsoft to invest more resources in fixing the problem. Perhaps they need to be more aggressive about background services, perhaps they need to take a more active hand in device driver development (even if only for the hardware they put into their first-party machines)...
Since your experience isn't typical of running Windows on that laptop, so clearly something is wrong. I hate it when anecdotal posts like yours get modded up. Nothing against you personally but one guy having an non-typical experience due to some unresolved issue isn't very helpful or representative.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Windows has bad battery life because it chooses to.
How would spell cheque have helped? Lost and Lots are both in the dictionary. This is won of the reasons I never use spell cheque.
I come here for the love
Review all the scheduled tasks to see how often Windows 7 and 8 wake up to do something. This is not you computer - it belongs to Microsoft. I cannot turn off WiFi without using the device manager.
Look at the size of the winxsx folder. Better spring for a bigger SSD. Windows is so easy to bash!
That's treason around here. Hand in your Slashdot card as you pass through the exit.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Linux performance on laptops is just horrid. The only way to check this is to find a common platform for testing. I suggest taking one of the Hackentosh laptops from http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/03/four-best-hackintosh-laptops-for-2012.html and comparing Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
They turned off the optimizations when compiling Vista; I can imagine they continued that practice. It might be one of the causes.
Windows needs to deal with a broader array of components than MacOS does.
Plain and simple.
With MacOS, it's relatively easy to "dial in" power management because they don't have to make allowances for a vast breadth of component differentiation.
Windows doesn't have that luxury. So they have to deal with less than optimal settings for certain subsystems, causing them to eat/bleed more power.
This also takes into account the fact that portions of the OS were never designed with optimal power management in mind. Something that will take time to make it's way through and be rewritten for.
On top of that, some optimizations for power management in Windows could result in system performance loss.
MacOS has had it's UI "tweaked" in ways that disguise crappy/slow performance.
Windows, really, hasn't. So there are areas where such loss of performance would be QUITE noticeable.
So trying to compare a dialed in niche OS on a dialed in niche platform with an OS that runs the other 90+% of everything out there (and is expected to run pretty much any component you give it) is a bit disingenuous. Don't you think?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So, stop talking about it like it is a tablet. It's a convertible laptop, similar to the ones they tried to sell 6 or so years ago...
for a while I ran a lab of x86 servers mixed with windows + linux. .O.OOOOO.O.O.OOOOO.OOOO.OOO. and linux more like .O....................O..................O................O.
I could always tell the windows ones vs the linux ones just by watching the disk activity lights.
windows was
I would have been interested to see what the gap looks like on a Hackintosh where, presumably, hardware optimizations would be in Windows' favor. I suspect the gap would remain, since the battery optimizations don't depend much on device drivers.
Subject line states the case. Windows, and I believe all other Microsoft software products, have always been designed to be easy to sell. Other attributes, such as ease of use or durability in real life activities, have always been secondary, unless performance is so bad that it interferes with sales. This is the traditional consumerism approach to making products.
OTOH, FOSS software is not developed for the showroom: there is no showroom. The emphasis during development is on meeting the needs of actual users in real life activities. So different things take precedence.
Go with Windows for the very best in the latest bling. Look for a FOSS based product-- like Android or Ubuntu-- for long term, and constantly improving, real life performance. Be wary of new FOSS products; not all of them are good or have staying power, but generally the critical reviews will identify the ones that work well and are likely to continue to get better.
Now that battery performance has been brought to the public's attention in a way that is likely to hurt Microsoft's sales revenues, we can expect improvement in that behavior. Battery life simply has not been a factor that Microsoft has seen as important, until now.
Will
You are going at this the wrong way. First off you cant compare a full PC operating system to a mobile device, so lets throw that out of the window. The question is why is OS X so good at power management? Windows is actually not bad at power management, most people here on Slashdot (even die hard Linux users) will admit that Linux is by far the worst out of the 3 on a PC platform. As someone else above me stated earlier, Apple have put a lot of R&D into researching battery run time performance. Their inclusion of two inbuilt graphic cards (one high performance and one for general usage) being a big step they took into improving battery runtime. This is why even Windows on a Macbook will not perform as well as OS X because it just havent got support to switch between two graphic cards based on what the system actually needs at that time. There are obviously a lot more tweaks Apple have done as well, but there are too many to list here...
I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?
My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...
In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.
One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.
I used to be fairly familiar with this problem, and the answer is that there isn't one answer. There are lots, which is why it's such a hard problem for MSFT to tackle.
Some of it is hardware choices - Windows is a pretty heavyweight OS, so the tendency is to use Intel instead of ARM, higher CPU clock speeds and larger (S|D)RAMs to make it feel at home. Plus of course the apps are a bloatfest. The result is higher power consumption.
Some of it is Windows thinking it owns the idle time to do whatever it wants (defrag, virus, search indexing, etc.). On other mobile OSs, the idle time is owned by power management first and foremost.
Some of it is crappy drivers that don't bother to take advantage of power management features present in the hardware.
Some of it is Windows not having APIs to make apps power aware from the beginning. As a result lots of things you'd like to do break old apps, and backwards compatibility is viewed as key.
Some of it is irrationality in the Windows hardware logo testing procedures that cause HW vendors to do bass ackwards stuff to make Microsoft happy.
Some of it is that Microsoft didn't push power to the WinTel HW vendors very hard in the past, and it's hard to change directions on a dime.
Some of it is that Windows applications don't really have an API for sporadic updates out of idle timed by the OS (mail fetch etc) and instead have a tendency to set timers and go do things on their own schedule. Since the schedules aren't coordinated, the device isn't idle much.
Add all those problems up, and you have a structural gap that's basically impossible to fix by changing any one thing.
ya — iOS was designed for power management from the get-go, whereas windows is just DOS with a GUI bolted on, and then internet/network bolted on, and then windows NT grafted in, and then surface and mobile bolted on, and legacy background CPU processes and general bloat and cruftiness just cant keep down the CPU usage to match power dedicated hardware — and with the latest iOS 7 — time coalescing of tasks and threads so the power doesnt havent to run as continuously — windows 7 wont match that feature for years — take a look at your task manager, and look at all those crufty old DLLs and processes — you cant get rid of them, so you just need more battery juice — if you're running java — that's just extra processor juice over running native code, so things like that take a hit on battery life too. also — the typical CISC processors used by windows are more complex, and inherently require more power than processors like the ARM which were designed with power management in mind. you would have to recompile all your apps to work well with processor features and methods.
"The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system."
FUCK YOU.
Sorry, reflex action from a decade and a half of dealing with the "most reliable aspect of any operating system" and the thing about windows that really drove me to OSX.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually it is a typical experience with the particular model I'm discussing. It has almost no air ventilation, and I even took it apart to mod the chassis a bit and gave it better airflow, after using an app to undervolt the CPU. My mods of software + hardware netted about a 20 C drop in average temps under OSX, but failed to help nearly as much under XP (though it did help enough to make it usable). This particular model just makes too much heat as it comes stock. It's the Core2 Duo with ATI X1600 graphics model. Right now browsing the web I am at 46-47 C core temp.
This is sorta like Apples and Oranges, but...
You mean Apples and Windows, right? :)
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Recompile OSX with Microsoft tools and watch the battery life difference disappear.
From the comments on the main article, I read this link [1].
The kicker? This was from 2009, referencing 10.5.7, a four-year old OSX vs. Windows 7. I'd be interested to see if a recent netbook hackintosh with Mavericks vs. WIndows 8.1 would show... likely an even wider divergence given the findings in this /. post.
[1] http://www.mobilemag.com/2009/05/14/hackintosh-netbooks-experience-33-battery-life-boost/
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
the 11" MBA has a smaller battery and still gets ~11 hours.
The 11" MBA also has inferior specs. The Surface pushes nearly twice as many pixels with a 1080p screen versus 768p. Surface also has a 1.6 GHz clock speed compared to 1.3 GHz for the MBA. Finally Surface has a touch screen and an active digitizer, which I assume must be drawing some power.
Windows is the victim of decades of uncontrolled bloat. It is unnecessarily large and inefficient for what it actually does. Apart from being very wasteful with CPU compared to Linux for example, even when Windows is supposedly idle it is actually engaging in a lot of activity. For example, regmon shows that even a supposedly idle PC not running any applications is doing like 5-10 registry writes a second and even more reads, not to mention swap I/O for no apparent reason. Who knows what the heck its really doing, but thats a LOT of (unnecessary?) Disk I/O over, say an hour. My guess (and thats all it is) is that most of the activity probably has no benefit to the user, and/or is just "workaround" solutions (e.g. needing to continuously run a defragment because NTFS sucks) to cover for Microsoft not having "done it right" at an architectural level.
As far as I can tell, Linux (Android etc) is far better designed and architected so it is more efficient with the CPU it does use, and also just doesn't (need to) do as much housekeeping activity.
Consequently with Linux and most other non-Windows OS's I've played with, Idle more often means actually idle, so much less peripheral activity. In turn, CPU throttling, disk & bus spindown and other hardware power-saving features that only occur when the OS is actually idle can be active far more often.
Hmm... the blurb is comparing high end x86 CPUs to ARM devices, and TFA doesn't go into much detail regarding testing methodology. I have a surface and surface pro. Guess what? The surface has great battery life, and the surface pro has run of the mill laptop battery life (but is nearly as portable as an arm tablet). I have noticed that windows 8 is a power hog the first few days after a new install, since it does background indexing, updates, etc, etc... That might account for some of the gap, depending on how thorough the tests were. The laptops where I have done direct comparisons between Linux and windows generally come out as a tie, assuming windows and Linux are both correctly configured; otherwise 2x discrepancies are pretty common (in both directions).
Anyway, it can't be the kernel, since my windows 8 phone has *awesome* battery life (multiple days of normal use) if I force it to "always enable" battery saver. This disables all background applications (including system tasks like push email) unless the phone is charging, but (unlike with my old android), I can rely on the thing having some charge left when I pull it out of my pocket at 5PM.
Most people I know don't bother with the aggressive power management settings it (with default settings, battery life is competitive with other phones on the market), but I can't be bothered to remember to charge it on a regular basis...
A V8 truck engine consume more gasoline than a V4.
It's good to get 1st of the 2 weekly micro$oft bashing articles out early this week. Otherwise, you know - we could forget it's the year of Linux on the desktop.
So if we're talking science, and not tech blogger knee jerk crap, you want to compare Windows RT and Android and iOS. http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/microsoft-surface-rt-1085839/review/7#articleContent says "We looped a 1080p WMV video in the built-in app that ships with Windows RT until the battery died, a test we run on every tablet that graces the TechRadar testing lab. Under these conditions Surface lasted an impressive 450 minutes, equaling a gob-smacking 7 ½ hours. This is nearly two hours longer than the iPad 3, which suffers from powering that glorious Retina display." So on the same hardware, Windows blasted past iOS by two hours. Other than your title, and spooge of MS hatred, wheres the proof? Oh lets measure x86 vs ARM? Then ask the right question, Why is x86 less battery efficient than ARM? just type it in google because it's been an article a million times...
That would be my best guess. They can use a lot of CPU-cycles. Most linux and mac laptops probably don't have antivirus installed.
Why is this marked as troll?
Take out your oscilloscope and probe the backlight LED's. The single largest use of power in an idle laptop is the screen backlight.
If the PWM frequency is different between different OS's, adjust the brightness settings until they are the same, then do your test.
My old laptop sits idle at 23 watts when the backlight on full brightness, only 11 watts when on low brightness (granted, its a cold cathode, not an LED backlight, but the two are still in the same ballpark for power efficiency).
Also changing the power profile by altering the core voltage for each frequency makes a huge difference as well. It still gets half an hour battery life, despite the battery only having 11% of its original capacity. Good ol' Windows XP.
svchost.exe
OK, then take the 13" MBA's ~14 hour battery life and scale it down by the relative battery size difference, which gives you 11.1h on the MBA to the 6.7h on the SP2.
This isn't news, per the article, testing in 2009 on an MBP turned out results of 8.1h for OSX and 5.5h for Win7... It's been known for a long time that Windows has poor battery life (or, perhaps, OS X has better than average battery life). Either way, it means Microsoft needs to do something. Be it taking a deeper role in driver development, or investing the resources in OS-level enhancements, or whatever else is required.
An observation from using my Windows laptop while in low power mode - if i leave a dynamic-ish website running in a browser tab i can hear the cooling fan running loudly a lot. Then go back and close just the tabs with dynamic pages like picture carousels and all that going on and the cooling fan stops in less than a minute and stays off/very quiet. The double drain of the cpu draw and the cooling fan draw can take 1 hour off my batterys usual 3 hour life. IE/Chrome/Firefox
I vaguely recall someone from AMD (??) writing a paper back when Vista was introduced that went over the implementation of driver signing in Windows, and how that was going to impact battery life. Basically, as I recall, in order to implement DRM the OS will repeatedly check the drivers and the hardware to make sure that all signatures remain valid, so it doesn't really idle well at all.
That seems to be exactly the way Gnome works these days. The difference is that I can strip all the Gnome stuff and I still end up with a working system, just one without Gnome. And, surprise, my battery now lasts much longer.
AccountKiller
13" MBA still has the slower processor, still has lower resolution display (1440 x 900) and still lacks touch and digitizer support. So yeah, you've changed nothing about the comparison.
Everyone knows, three words, Pre-emptive Multi Tasking....
It's like we used to say: Windows is a second rate UI on top of a third rate DOS, on top of a fourth rate scheduler. It just fires shit off when it gets around to it. Completely retarded.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The use case for windows is mainly literally on desks, whether device portable or not. Battery not important. That simple.
I don't care if windows even works on battery power, let alone for how long.
And if Microsoft ever does a less good job of something I DO care about, out of battery use concerns, I will simply eradicate windows from my life.
For one thing, 20 years after being obsoleted by DNS, MS machines still blasts out NETBIOS address requests. So, one reason for the bad power use is that Windows machines are all full of CACA.
when I fire up XP it goes into TURBOFAN MODE
Particular bad model or paticular bad installation -- irrelevant -- it is still an outlier and not typical of 99% of WinXP installations. Even though you are upset with your situation, it does not add anything to discussion.
For a counter-example, my i5 + SSD + nothing installed Windows 7 boots 8 seconds, while Ubuntu boots 3 seconds. This my experience but it is relevant because almost anyone can replicate it with comparable hardware.
Not really. The processors are identical, excepting the TDP share between the CPU and the GPU. The MBA has an Core i5-4250U while the SP2 has a lower-end Core i5-4200U. They're both 15W TDP parts with the same turbo clocks, but the MBA has a lower minimum clock in order to make up for the higher power draw from the GPU. In the end, considering how low power draw is at idle, that's not making a big difference. Besides that, if you put OS X and Windows on the same hardware, Windows consistently delivers dramatically less battery life. In that case, there are no hardware differences whatsoever.
It'd be nice if this wasn't the case, because I'm primarily a Windows user, and I'd rather run Windows on my MBA if the battery life wasn't so much worse than OS X.
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If you look at their 3Dmark IceStorm scores, the Mac is getting lower scores (38800) vs the Surface P2 (42600). Considering that the Mac is running HD 5000 (20IU) vs the SP2's HD 4400 (16IU), with 25% more GPU resources, the Mac should not be scoring 10% lower in 3dmark. I.e. the GPU in a MBA has been significantly downclocked to lower power draw. Given the overall discrepency, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that Apple has enforced a SDP/TDP closer to 10W, while SP2 is allowing a full 15W.
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Rubbish. The netbook I'm typing this on right now dual-boots Ubuntu (full Unity bloat version) and Windows 7 Starter. It gets (or used to get a year or so ago, when the battery was a little newer) 6.5 hours under Ubuntu, more like 4.5 under Windows.
Anybody remember how Windows Vista (I think) at first had terrible performance deleting files because it searched even the deleted files for DRM-relevant material? There definitely was quite a long time in history when laptops running Windows ran circles around Linux regarding battery life. Admittedly, a significant part of that was quite more power-friendly rotating disk management (not necessarily data-friendly).
Nowadays, a Windows laptop is much more likely to spend significant amounts of computing power on things you don't want it to do than a GNU/Linux system (and yes, the GNU in GNU/Linux is important here since it is the userland that tends to waste cycles on things you don't want: a Linux kernel on an Android system is quite more likely to spend cycles on stuff that enjoys little sympathy from its users).
Battery life is just another dimension to the performance curve. Along with CPU usage, memory usage and defect count.
For 20+ years Microsoft has maintained a position where they did not need to compete on performance. Moore's law and being a monopoly helped them keep that position.
Now after 20+ years, all the bad habits are ingrained. So much so that a lowly programmer trying to write some new clean code is chastised by his manager who was a programmer in the old days and "knows better".
It is not just one big thing, but hundreds of little things that add up to one stinking pile of crap.
I could point out the excess of svchost.exe processes, the chokepoint of the registry, the fact that when I run find or updatedb on a NTFS or VFAT partition it takes twenty times longer, or a hundred other things. But the fact is that it is all those things not one. Which makes things worse because when a lowly programmer actually gets a manager to agree to fix one of these things, they don't get m,uch improvement and the manager says "see told you so, not worth the effort".
who is going to waste money developing good quality drivers, for hardware that makes a doesn't sell / makes a huge loss, because it runs an operating system that nobody wants?
Every windows machine is part of the NSA botnet used to crack encryption and spy on you.
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I've got a Core i5 laptop that can do 8 hours on the standard battery. The apple guys only get 2-3 hours out of their comparable (in capability and age) Macbooks with similar sized batteries.
Why can't I run any of the programs I need for work on an iPad?
Um didn't you just make his point for him? Apple has spent time optimizing their hardware and software for power consumption. They would rafter have 11h of battery life than a higher 3d mark score. Why? Because most people using an Intel GPU will not be hard core gaming.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Hey Guys, it's GotCrax. Based on my tests with Windows 7 and 8 and all the previous models, it is possible to lengthen battery life by shutting down unnecessary applications. So Battery life can be extended or shortened based on processes. It is also a known fact that we run far more programs on Windows than we do on Linux or Mac.
Moreover, most of the apps you run on windows come with some form of a startup function; meaning that the second your system boots up, it is already running more apps than when your linux or Mac environment boots.
Also, remember that windows systems do not employ actively managed kernels which optimize the system as it is being used, and not as a secondary measure, where as Windows runs background apps like Disk Fragmentation, System Backup, Windows Defender, Windows Update, Windows Firewall and such.. Yes I am aware that Linux and Mac have flavours of those functions but they are far more limited thus not wasting battery life.
Next, I'd like to point out that Windows comes, for most users, out of the box. It is not customized or optimized to one system or set of hardware and as such, runs with third party processes and equipment. This does make a GREAT difference. I have personally had experiences with badly matched hardware screwing with my system. Whether it is loops in the code or otherwise, I'm not sure; but what I do know is that my system ran slower and depleted battery life MUCH faster.
In a nutshell, Mac systems are designed and coded for the hardware they work on. They employ better file systems that require no external management or additional background apps and less background processes. Why are they better at managing battery? Different approaches to coding? Specialists focusing on power management? Who knows. One thing we know for sure is that regardless of the people's requests, Windows and Linux developers have made little to no efforts optimizing and managing battery life in their operating systems. Best reason I can think of is that it is impossible to consider every permutation.
It's not priority with them. First off any system that purports to do all things for all mankind on all platforms is going to have an enormous amount of inherent bloat and carry alongs because it's too hard not to write highly generic high level abstractions and interfaces at every step of the intrasystem process scheme.
Secondly, Windows has never been designed as a mobile or portable system. It's a bolt on like nearly everything else. Hell, networking is a bolt on it's not built in. So mobility is yet another extension that sort of jams itself here and there into the rest of the system. It's essentially running a desktop system with a bunch of frills on top of it that run mobile but underneath it's the same old same old leviathan.
Third - MS has always relied on the power of hardware over efficiency. Wintel is more than a term, it's a dysfunctional marriage. MS has always jammed as many features together with the expectation that Intel would paper it all over with bigger faster hotter CPU's. MS systems run junk in the background because their CPU's allow them to.
Fourth - they're just not all that interested in your demands. They're interested in their demands. Battery life isn't anything they care about.
Having lots of background processes lying around isn't the problem. It's one of the effective ways of structuring an operating system. The problem is in how they are implemented.
Processes that wait for something should not use the CPU time until the event happens. Unfortunately, it's extremely easy to write code that runs around in a loop waiting for the event. This is called busy waiting.
It requires careful design effort to do this properly, and an OS kernel that provides the necessary tools.
The OS must be able to managing events and waking a waiting process up only when the event happens. And it must be able to manage waiting on any of multiple events (a feature that is easily left out of event management). And to be effective agaoins power wastage, the OS should at put the CPU into a low-power mode when it is just waiting (this will require CPU support as well).
I would be surprised if all those mysterious processes were carefully written to avoid busy waiting, especially when it's really easy just to loop.
-- hendrik
I have read only a few treads about the windows managing the battery life and its performance overall.
And in my personal case I changed from win7 to ubuntu 10.04 because I am a gamer and windows consumes itself so much resource that i cant play games with high quality when i should with my specs. so i changed to ubuntu passed some time learning how to work with wine a PlayOnLinux(Wine manager) and 90% of games i play on my PC with ubuntu work the same or better with the same machine. Example Tomb Raider 2013 works as if its native. So in my opinion the problem of windows is the lack of optimization. they prefer to spend money on new features that make the problem less problematic instead of removing the problem
On my older Macbook pro OSX would refuse to run the cooling fans unless it was an absolute emergency. Sometimes the damned thing would get so hot that it would actually cross the line of overheating and things like Netflix would start lagging hard. Same machine with Windows 8 installed, I immediately noticed that Windows was doing a better job at keeping the hardware safe and being much more liberal on the cooling. Same on the Surface. If you listen really really carefully you can actually hear the fan inside gap on the edge of the casing. (and you can really hear and feel it if you launch DOTA2 on it)
Is it due to the fact that Windows GUI is bundled with Kernel?
Casteism
You could always read the "Windows [OS] Internals" books and find that it's trying to keep disk indices up to date, keep time and certificates up to date/current with appropriate servers, looking for updates, optimizing disk access, looking for changes in propagated rights and restrictions (which get "pushed" down from above), so old credentials are timed out and/or updated (effects of group policy, primarily, as group membership doesn't change dynamically)...checking that subscriptions are up-to-date (multiple formats (url based, rss, email, other messaging, etc).
Window's supported API is much larger than what most other OS's provide -- with MS still supporting programs from the XP era 10 years ago as well as modern DirectX11 progs .. vs. Linux. HA!... My linux vendor can't be troubled to support **one level** of previous-releases with any current release.
Linux doesn't really have a 3rd party market API to support. Many WinXP games work on Win7. Show me 1 3D-graphics prog from 2000 that runs on the linux of that day and today with no changes. Doesn't exist.
With a move of data to the cloud, with slower data rates and constant updates, (you do want your phone to beep when you have a new message, right?), devices need to stay on longer to get info. Windows has LONG been about supporting centralized business control over client machines. Vista was about creating a trusted computing core that could be known to be "integrous" so it could play encrypted digital media in a way that would be able to give guarantees to media owners about the media being protected -- something still in infancy in Linux, but with companies like RedHat & SuSE(now an "AttachMate" subsidiary) getting closer to secure boot & running of signed-only SW and central service control with Systemd.
The Linux versions that don't use much power are not providing those newer features and likely aren't systemd based.
What windows does in background is well documented -- and is a considerably longer list than what Linux provides. I can't even install and run a newer generation of "perl" on my linux box without being told it is "unsupported", vs. Windows providing Visual C interfaces from 2000-2013 in side-by-side libs that usually work).
I can't believe a comment based on ignorance got rated so highly for "insightful".....
(None of the above should be thought to indicate a love for MS or Windows... which give me ample reasons to hate them... But the wild-west development and support[sic] existing in Linux is getting worse as time goes on and giving me more reasons to appreciate the MS elephant in the room...)
Maybe hiding all your system processes behind several copies of svchost.exe isn't helping the matter?
Seriously, this is a stupid question.
Its the same reason older versions of OSX and Linux were power hogs, the apps aren't designed to be intelligent about power consumption.
Android does a piss poor job, but tries to control consumption of energy in its apps.
iOS forces sane power consumption via the app store approval process and a set of APIs that have no problem hard terminating an ill behaving app.
Change Windows to behave like iOS and you'll find a different type of battery life, but you'll also have some issues due to all the shitty apps that don't deal with being terminated properly.
I'm not sure what is going on but I view the surface 2/2 pro as MS's attempt to get vendors to step up their game.
I typically forget to charge my RT but it still powers on and plays cut the rope etc when I feel like it.
My pro(1) can last through two classes of note taking and reddit browsing.
So really, I feel 8 is limited more by hardware than by the os itself.
So the energy company dude pays some engineer handsomly to toss is a little extra waste. That ineffcient algorithm is now silently generating $5million/year in *free* revenue.
No, because power usage = needing to build infrastructure. They want everyone to be as energy-efficient, because then they don't have to build power plants and upgrade lines as much.
Power companies practically throw CFLs and energy-efficient appliances at people and are constantly putting energy-conservation tips in their mailings, etc. Utilities in general are more than happy to pay for a home energy audit; my parent's gas company did a whole-house leak test and gave us all sorts of insulating widgets, paid for insulating our attic, etc. There are rebates on more efficient furnaces and water heaters, too.
Seriously - I recently found out that our power company at work gives out 10-year zero-interest loans to businesses if the new equipment provides energy savings.
Power companies should band together and offer to pay for Microsoft to have a huge team of software engineers auditing code and working on energy use and optimizing Windows and the Microsoft compilers. The payback would be incredible. Power companies could do the same thing tomorrow for Linux and BSD if they wanted.
Please help metamoderate.
OS X Apple vs Windows on Apple might not be the best comparison for a couple of reasons:
OS X runs in EFI while Windows runs in emulated BIOS. That basically means that OS X has access to both the integrated graphics card and the discrete one and can switch between them via a small IO poke on the gMux. On Windows, you only get the discrete graphics card that uses a lot more power.
Apple doesn't optimize the drivers for Windows and they are mostly a copy of the upstream drivers, while the OS X ones are highly tuned for the hardware in your computer.
An EFI Windows install (possible on the Haswell systems) with a gMux driver for Windows might produce better results, but that depends on how tuned the drivers are.
iOS or Android vs. Windows on ARM is a comparison between the new and the mature. Microsoft's compiler for ARM is not yet as well optimized as LLVM or GCC. There is a lot of new code that still needs cleanups and they haven't been optimizing it for such a long time as Apple. Apple started work on XNU (iOS) for ARM in 2007 while Microsoft probably started somewhere in 2011. That's a lot of time.
Generally, Windows has a good battery life, much better than Linux used to have and even OS X. Apple started improving it's battery life dramatically in Tiger and newer OSs.
Linux was released in 1991. Windows began in 1985. Neither more than superficially resembles its current implementation, either visually or when you drill down to the code, but Windows is older. Also, Android does not run on Linux, it IS Linux, one of many distributions or "distros" of Linux.