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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!
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."
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
(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?
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.