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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!
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.
Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Well Windows Phone 7 seems to be great when it comes to power management.
Android is awful. (Suppose WP8 will be as bad as the rest).
You're right, my WP7 phone (a Lumia 900) lasts way longer than my Galaxy S3... Never mind that WP7 can't run any apps in the history of ever (most notably it cant run a microsoft account-capable version of Skype, a microsoft product) but hey the battery will be there when I NEED 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.
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.
The author is a massive troll for comparing Surface Pro hardware (which runs a full blown i5 processor) with iOS and Android hardware (which is typically far lower power both in terms of wattage and processing).
He's also comparing it against a MacBook, which can have exactly the same i5 processor. See the part in TFS about how running Windows on Apple Hardware doesn't actually change the deficit?
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Depends on what you're doing. My laptop gets better life on Linux than it ever did in Windows, but all I do with it is surf the web. It doesn't require a lot of processing power, and Windows wastes a lot of clock cycles running stuff it doesn't need to accomplish the task.
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?
If a multi-hour Windows battery becomes a multi-minute battery in Linux, you have a serious problem that needs to be fixed. That is not normal system behaviour.
Install problems are rare these days with Linux, but they're not unheard of. I'd guess that you've got some sort of hardware driver issue if the battery is discharging as crazily as that.
My experience of battery life with Linux (mostly using full-fat, full-bloat Ubuntu) is that it has always as good or better than Windows, except on one laptop I once installed on which I had serious driver issues with, which first refused to charge the battery at all, and then (after I'd fixed that) was discharging within about an hour. Once I'd fixed it, though, it was back to normal. And one problem-filled laptop build out of many dozens isn't a bad record really.
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
"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