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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.'"

5 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 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'.

    3. 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.

  2. 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.