Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

Posted by Soulskill on from the optimized-for-profit dept.

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.'"

13 of 558 comments (clear)

  1. Easy one... by unique_parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...because it's old and bloated!

    1. Re:Easy one... by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's a deliberately obtuse answer and you know it. OBVIOUSLY it's doing things in the background. You'd think with 10 years of people beating on it from every angle, someone would've figured out what all these magic things are. What are users getting for all this background processing?

      And if our ability to understand what's going on in the background is so poor, how can we ever trust the OS to do what we want it to? (I know the answer for a lot of folks out there is, "we can't".) It's possible to get process listings and logs, and apparently none of these explain it. But maybe someone out there that used to work for Microsoft can answer the question--you think we'd have better luck actually asking Microsoft themselves what the answer is?

    2. Re:Easy one... by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      OK, Jeff and Anand, listen up: it's because Windows is doing things in the background.

      So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    3. Re:Easy one... by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Alas, you have managed to correctly but uselessly answer the question (in classic MS fashion). Apparently the other OSes get by without all that idle activity, so why not windows. Is it incapable of it or is MS just unwilling?

      The question was 'why is Windows so awful at managing power", not 'in what way does Windows squander power'.

    4. Re:Easy one... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's because Windows isn't as good at doing things in the background. Unfortunately it isn't easy to explain, but the gist of it is that other systems wake up, run all the tasks that need to run and then go back to sleep. Windows just wakes up as and when it needs to, so there is more time wasted switching in and out of sleep and overall more time in the active state.

      I do this stuff for a living, it's fun stuff.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:Easy one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Did you read the article... of course not. They didn't just compared it to Android and IOS, they also compared the desktop/laptop versions, i.e. to OSX, which does not run on ARM.

    6. Re:Easy one... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Windows OS is built to work with a very wide variety of hardware configurations. Just because the Surface devices come in one hardware profile doesn't mean Microsoft spent years fine-tuning the OS to take advantage of that hardware exclusively. Which is exactly what Apple does with OS X.
      Sorry that is just complete bullshit. If you had read the article or at least the summary that would be clear to you.
      Hardware has nothing to do with the fact that Windows is doing all the time some nonsense in the background. There where times on 4GHz notebooks where you could not watch a simple DVD because it would hang every 30 seconds for half a second. What the fuck has that to do with "windows has to cover multiple hardware combinations"?
      The problem with windows is not only windows alone but also stupid virus scanners, hard drive encryption, search index update stuff etc.
      Note: hardware interacts with the system very simple, there is no reason that a wide variety of hardware in any way slows down the "kernel"! Your opinion only shows you have no clue about programming or software or hardware or operation systems or all of that.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    7. Re:Easy one... by tibman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Windows OS is built to work with a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
      Have you seen the list of hardware linux can run on? Windows ships with drivers, yes, but it depends on hardware manufacturers to ship their own drivers a lot of the time.

      --
      http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
  2. Re: Historically inefficient OS is Inefficient by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:Found yer problem by jeffmeden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  4. The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life... by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Reduce by realityimpaired · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. In the middle, a giant WTF by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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