Windows 10 Adds Battery Saver Feature

jones_supa writes In past builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview there has been an interesting feature called Battery Saver, but for the time being it has been just a mockup. In a leaked build 9888, the code is now in place. Battery Saver, as the name implies, will help your mobile device make the most out of your battery. This feature works by limiting the background activity on your device when the mode is activated. You can turn the feature on any time but there is also a setting to have it automatically turn on when the battery capacity goes below a user-defined percentage. Considering that this build was not supposed to make its way out of Redmond and that the company is not releasing any new builds this year, this may be the best look we get until the Consumer Preview arrives.

Comments

Stable enough?

[ArcadeMan]

Is Windows 10 Technical Preview stable enough for a gaming PC?

Re:Stable enough?

[jones_supa]

I would say yes. There aren't really any stability problems but things keep somewhat shuffling around as new builds are released. It should give you a nice free gaming OS until it expires in spring. :)

Re:Stable enough?

[ArcadeMan]

If you had to choose between Windows XP or Windows 10 Technical Preview, which one would you choose?

Re:Stable enough?

[mlts]

I'd go for Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2. The advantage of this over W8 or W8.1 are a few things. What comes to mind is offline deduplication,, a built in backup tool (wbadmin) which reasonably works, a ZFS-like volume manager (Storage Spaces) which can do autotiering, and a decent hypervisor built in.

Re:Stable enough?

[kanuac]

If you had to choose between Windows XP or Windows 10 Technical Preview, which one would you choose?

You pervert!

Re:Stable enough?

[ArcadeMan]

I'm talking about a gaming PC and your arguments are about backup tools and things that only a business admin* would use?

* I'm just guessing here, I never heard about volume managers, storage spaces, autotiering or hypervisors.

Re:Stable enough?

[ArcadeMan]

If someone's talking about a gaming PC and your solution is OS X, Linux or BSD, you're in for a world of pain alright.

Re:Stable enough?

[EndlessNameless]

You should be able to dual boot and decide for yourself. Given the lack of security updates for Windows XP, I wouldn't touch it personally.

That stuff they patch every month usually includes at least one or two really bad things.

Re:Stable enough?

[EndlessNameless]

None of that stuff has any value on a gaming PC.

Not to mention the price bump, assuming this is acquired legally.

The Standard editions of Microsoft Server are no longer economical for home use. And using a cracked OS is borderline moronic---if they can crack the activation, they can certainly insert a root kit and other goodies.

Re:Stable enough?

[jeffmflanagan]

Is Windows 10 Technical Preview stable enough for a gaming PC?

Yes, if you only use it as a gaming PC; No, if you want a full-featured stable PC. Steam and games were working fine for me. I only ditched the Win 10 preview because of issues with File Explorer.

Re:Stable enough?

[spire3661]

Depends on what im going to use it for. I know XP inside and out. There is nothing wrong with XP, its a perfectly useful OS, with some strings attached. Its not dead, its not even fully deprecated.

Re:Stable enough?

[spire3661]

I want to add that my gaming rig is maintained in a super stable state. I dont even browse on it. It jsut plays games. I dont even allow stuff like input wrappers so i can use third party controllers on PC.

Re:Stable enough?

[Blaskowicz]

Microsoft relies on cracked versions for its market share so they don't make it too hard (though, I saw a Windows 8.x PC that simply whined every 24 hours and you had to hit win, esc or alt-tab to make it go away)

What's more boring about a server install is 1) they do enforce the TSE / RDS licenses (maybe CAL, I don't know) though there might be further cracks for that. 2) "free" antiviruses refuse to run. They're "free, as long as you do what we want". Damn.

Windows server + antivirus + allowing of remote applications and desktops would be a bit like running Linux and Wine, in that you can do whatever (have my desktop be a DHCP, proxy and what not? sure, if that's what I want), with some things worse (less so with Windows 10 / Server 2015) and some things better (like games running, game installers and/or DRM running, high quality drivers and sound with less CPU use etc. and a shit ton of software available.)

Re:Stable enough?

[Zordak]

Depends on what im going to use it for. I know XP inside and out. There is nothing wrong with XP, its a perfectly useful OS, with some strings attached. Its not dead, its not even fully deprecated.

In fact, Windows XP doesn't want to go on the cart. It feels fine! It thinks it'll go for a walk.It feels happyyyyyy.

Re:Stable enough?

[GigaplexNZ]

Storage Spaces and Hyper-V are in the client versions of Windows too.

Re:Stable enough?

[thegarbz]

NO. Its stable enough to be used as a TEST rig

The difference between a TEST rig and a Gaming PC is what exactly?

triggering below percentage is dumb

[savuporo]

so, I have had this annoyance with android forever.
there are multiple battery saver things that trigger saving features when I'm below percentage - but its obviously too late then!!

the trigger needs to activate when the RATE OF DRAIN exceeds a particular threshold

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[TFlan91]

^ This.

So this. 100x this.

The logic behind all these battery savers is ridiculous.

"Your battery is now at 20%" - Let me warning you every 5 minutes that it's low, consuming even MORE battery. Once is enough, thanks.
"Your battery is now at 10%" - Let me tell all applications about this so they can all send their data to the "cloud" all at once, draining it EVEN FURTHER!
"Your battery is now at ... " - Phone turned off due to too many bells and whistles about your battery being low!

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[Rei]

One that annoys the heck out of me, if you have an unreliable charging source (poor cable or charging port, solar-powered charger, etc): the screen comes on, both when power starts, and when power disconnects. Combined with an unreliable charging source, your screen is constantly coming on, wasting what power you do get, and there's no way to disable it without root. (The best non-root option I've found is an app that shuts the screen off immediately after it turns out due to a power state change, but that's obviously not ideal).

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[mlts]

The only "real" battery saver utility I've seen on any device which actually was useful is the Extreme Battery Saver mode on the HTC One M8. This drops all network connections, changes the launcher to a simple one, stops all background apps, and allows for the phone, texting, and clock/alarm. This has come very much in handy, allowing for a phone to run multiple days on a single battery charge.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[Code Herder]

I solved that problem for good, I swapped my factory battery for a 10000mAh ( more than 3x the original capacity ). Sure, my phone is thicker now but usually I couldn't go through a day with my Samsung galaxy without recharging, now it's 3-4 days without a charge.

I got it from zero lemon, their prices are good and both batteries I've bought from them are 2 years old and still going strong. The only thing is you really, really have to follow the special charging instruction, which I did not after a few months and it really impacted the batteries max charge. It regained it's higher max charge after a week of doing it the right way. http://zerolemon.com/product/z...

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[MobyDisk]

One power saving feature on my phone is that it stops polling for text messages, thus forcing me to unlock the phone and click a refresh button, thus using more power than the background polling would have used in the first place.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[swb]

there are multiple battery saver things that trigger saving features when I'm below percentage - but its obviously too late then!!

Wouldn't it help if you moved the trigger percentage up to some higher value, maybe even as high as 66%? That way you cut the drain before your battery is at some critical level and can use the rest of the battery more sparingly. I agree that at 20% or some other low value it's too late.

the trigger needs to activate when the RATE OF DRAIN exceeds a particular threshold

Wouldn't rate of drain need to be combined with battery remaining? At 99% battery, I might not care about high drain levels because I'm so close to a full charge. At 66% it might start to matter.

I'm also curious how the drain rate is accounted for -- is it just the wattage consumption of battery, or do you filter it by source so that you exclude high wattage components like the screen and backlighting?

Re: triggering below percentage is dumb

[jovius]

If that's the case she is a good example for other technically aligned females who want to know more about the technology they are using.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[Alomex]

I understand Samsung's Ultra Power Saver mode also gives you several days on 20% battery power.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[savuporo]

I actually want it to warn me even if it is 99% full and draining fast, because i was planning to hike around all day in a city that i am visiting and will have no opportunity to charge. I know i will need every drop of charge for photos, google maps etc, but all of it needs to go into useful activities, not into background drain with some obscure rarely used app trying to randomly download updates or some BS like that.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[swb]

AFAIK, most cars have a reserve quantity that goes below the gauge's calibrated "empty" level. I'd suppose it's to allow for a few extra miles once you hit E but may just be to motivate you to fill up again before you put all the crud/water/etc that is at the bottom of the tank once you get near empty.

Maybe batteries should work like this -- have an extra 10-20% of charge beyond the 0% charge level. It could both keep you from going dead and maybe protect the battery from whatever wear occurs at the extreme end of the discharge cycle.

Of course the downside would be you'd actually have to *have* 10-20% more battery to get 10-20% more battery but since that won't happen we'd get a battery gauge that just shorted us by 20%.

Re: triggering below percentage is dumb

[savuporo]

rate of drain is obviously a critical variable when the screen is off and the thing is in my pocket. I.e after I have not actively used it for a minute or so. and even then instantaneous draw doesn't matter, but average draw over a minute or 5 matters a lot

as long as I'm holding it and doing something I know full well I am burning power - including doing things like playing games

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[mcrbids]

Maybe I just avoid horrible "battery saver" apps but I've never seen any particular tendency to have them actually further drain the battery. What kind of horrible "battery apps" do you torture yourself with?

I'd like to re-emphasize the GP post: the rate of drain is what a battery app should be focusing on, not battery life remaining.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[thegarbz]

the trigger needs to activate when the RATE OF DRAIN exceeds a particular threshold

This is a poorly thought out idea.

What exactly is a rate of drain that is excessive and what should you do about it?
Disable the GPU when playing games?
Kill 3G connectivity while downloading something?
Maybe turn down the brightness of the screen right after you turned it up because you couldn't see anything?

The rate of drain varies. I can happily start the day fully charged and end up with 10% left by lunch time then make it all the way through till home time with a little to spare. Rate of drain does not take into account any kind of changes in workload and changing settings as you go is a pain no one will actually endure.

The idea behind the percentage point is that your smarphone is only a smartphone for 90% of it's battery life. Consider it effectively empty when it gets to 10%. After that you have in your pocket a dumb phone good for sending texts and calling the wife to ask her to prep a charger for when you get home.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[thegarbz]

^ This.

So this. 100x this.

The logic behind all these battery savers is ridiculous.

"Your battery is now at 20%" - Let me warning you every 5 minutes that it's low, consuming even MORE battery. Once is enough, thanks.
"Your battery is now at 10%" - Let me tell all applications about this so they can all send their data to the "cloud" all at once, draining it EVEN FURTHER!
"Your battery is now at ... " - Phone turned off due to too many bells and whistles about your battery being low!

I would agree with you but I've never seen a phone do that. EVER.

All the phones I have typically do something like warn at 10% and warn again at 5% triggering battery saving features. I've never seen a phone then attempt to sync, warn you every 5 minutes, or do anything else as silly as what you wrote.

Currently my phone will warn at 15% once and once only.
At 10% it will go into low power mode unceremoniously dropping all Wifi and 3G connections while the screen is off, dim the screen, lock the CPU at its slowest speed, and kill all background applications leaving only the phone, sms, and internet browser operational. Standby time in this mode is approximately 2 days, which means if I am really stuck I can still make an emergency call when I need.

Also all "cloud" applications I have seen won't actually sync even if you want them to when the battery is below a certain percentage.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[savuporo]

You completely missed the point. Rate of drain is CRITICAL when the phone is on standby, i.e. in my pocket. When the screen is on with a bunch of foregrounded apps, the equation is completely different and rate of drain is not the primary issue.
For example, in screen active mode most of the time clocking down the CPU is about the stupidest thing you can do from battery saving perspective, as short bursts of high activity with long deep sleep cycles are more efficient than dragged out activity cycles on lower clock.
Saving battery is an active fight, and operating systems are always going to be fighting a losing battle against the apps - but by no means should they give up, there are myriad of untapped ways how to make the current situation much better for an average user.

The idea of having a 10% dumb phone in my pocket that cannot do anything does not match with any of my use cases. I simply dont send texts and rarely have to do phone calls. However, it is often critical that i can still open email and maps, for my wife it is critical to take this one last photo for which she has been saving for, and for someone else it is that one last foursquare checkin. Your pattern is not my pattern and vice versa, and there is a lot of improvement room for mobile operating systems to get much much smarter about that.

Yelling panic at 10% is something that my laptop did in 90ies.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[perryizgr8]

Or you can just fix your charger. Which would be the ideal solution instead of trying to mask a serious problem with hacks.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[thegarbz]

when the phone is on standby ... more efficient than dragged out activity cycles on lower clock.

Then please define to me standby. Does your phone randomly wake up and do things that you have asked it not to do? Mine doesn't. The activity of a phone in standby is a function of the apps you have and what you want it to do. By definition a phone doing what you ask it to is not "standby". If you have a problem with the battery drain the solution is the finesse of controlling your applications, not the hammer of locking down the phone.

Saving battery is an active fight, and operating systems are always going to be fighting a losing battle against the apps - but by no means should they give up, there are myriad of untapped ways how to make the current situation much better for an average user.

It's only an active fight if you don't know how to do something as basic as check which app is draining your phone (a feature of the Android OS), or incapable of installing an app to kill other apps which insist on doing something in the background (available on all platforms). Sitting there and taking punches is not a fight. If you were actually fighting you'd realise you have the upper hand already with the tools you currently have.

The idea of having a 10% dumb phone in my pocket that cannot do anything does not match with any of my use cases. I simply dont send texts and rarely have to do phone calls. However, it is often critical that i can still open email and maps, for my wife it is critical to take this one last photo for which she has been saving for, and for someone else it is that one last foursquare checkin. Your pattern is not my pattern and vice versa, and there is a lot of improvement room for mobile operating systems to get much much smarter about that.

Oh I fully agree, hence why the default is for the phone to be a dumb phone, but the actual settings are completely user adjustable. You don't want the phone .... well I don't actually know if you can disable the phone app in low battery mode, but on my phone I'm given the option of which apps are available. If one of them is Google Maps then so be it, but considering maps uses both GPS and data at the same time you may also want to adjust the level to 20% at which it kicks in.

Yelling panic at 10% is something that my laptop did in 90ies.

Yelling panic with reasonable battery life at use cases that can be expected from a phone is what you're suggesting. There's no way to configure a phone for all use cases based on standby drain, it's a difficult concept for most to grasp and the vast majority of smartphone users have enough trouble figuring out how to unlock their phones, let alone understand why they probably don't need the Facebook app to sync every minute. This goes double if not more so for the number of push applications that are installed on my phone. I don't want my phone screaming at me just because someone sends me a 15MB email.

Like it or not, the 90s option of the fuel warning light is something people understand, is easy to program for, covers a vast number of use cases, and can be very easy to make work for your use scenario.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[Rei]

A bad charging port often means replacing the whole phone, it's often cheaper. And how do you propose "fixing" a solar charger? Do you have magical powers over when the clouds come and go?

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[perryizgr8]

If a charger can't provide stable power, it is not ready for normal use. Stop using it. And bad charging port means a cheap trip to the service center. They never replace the entire phone.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[Rei]

So solar charging should be forced to be impossible for no good reason whatsoever? The only thing rendering it suchly is the stupid non-disableable screen-activation feature on Android.

BS on the charging port issue. I've had it happen twice, and it was never a "cheap trip to the service center", the estimated cost to repair was both times more than the cost of the phone.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[KozmoStevnNaut]

AFAIK, most cars have a reserve quantity that goes below the gauge's calibrated "empty" level. I'd suppose it's to allow for a few extra miles once you hit E but may just be to motivate you to fill up again before you put all the crud/water/etc that is at the bottom of the tank once you get near empty.

How do you think fuel is drained from a tank? By a floating pump that sips from the top or something? Do you imagine it works like when you're gulping down a mug of beer, that the fuel is tipped off from the top?

All fuel tanks are drained from the bottom all the time, otherwise any capacity below the level of the fuel pump's intake would be completely wasted. Any crud on the bottom of the tank will be caught by the fuel filter. Absorbed water isn't a huge problem unless it exceeds a certain level. I know diesel cars have water separators on the fuel feed lines, I assume newer gasoline cars work the same way (since modern gasoline contains ethanol, which tends to absorb moisture.)

It's exactly the same reason why it's bullshit advising people to never fill at a gas station that's currently having its tanks filled. Firstly, the pump pickups are obviously at the bottom to access the full capacity of the tanks. Secondly, modern subterranean tanks have internal bladders, so there's no rust of rust or crud.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[swb]

I suspect that much of the crud in a gas tank mostly remains in suspension as the car is driven. The more fuel in the tank and the more it is driven, the greater the dispersion. It can settle out when stopping and a low fuel level can increase the concentration.

Re:triggering below percentage is dumb

[KozmoStevnNaut]

It would have to be severely nasty inside said gas tank for that to even happen. Most gas tanks are absolutely spotless inside, even when pulled from 30-40 year old cars killed by rust. They only start to rust inside if you let them sit for a long time, and on modern cars that's not a problem either, since all gas tanks are either plastic-lined, painted inside or all plastic.

Unless you have a bad habit of always filling up in the middle of sandstorms, you'll never had a problem with crud in the tank of a modern car, unless it was deliberately put there.

Already in WP8

[Richard_at_work]

Interesting, been using this since WP8 was released, and its literally called "battery saver" - the blurb on the settings page says "When Battery Saver is on, all non-essential features and background tasks are truned off and push notifications are sent less often". So it looks like Windows Phone features are making the cut back into Windows.

Re:so....

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you were trolling, but I'll answer you anyway. No. It isn't something that is already available in all supported versions of Windows. It is a scheme similar to connected standby where only certain threads are allowed to run. It is just not as all encompassing as connected standby (where very little is allowed to run and IO, etc. is batched up). So the UI can remain responsive, but tasks that normally happen in the background will be delayed or not happen at all...

seriously?

[Goldsmith]

I know windows phone doesn't have a large market share, but no one involved with this looked to see if this is a new feature? I've had this on my phone for a long time, it's not special at this point. It's on by default under 20% charge. It is a real thing and definitely slows down battery drain; definitely better than trying to manually adjust settings to get that extra hour of battery life.

Re:seriously?

[dagamer34]

It's new to desktops. The idea came from Windows Phone, much like Notification Center.

Re:seriously?

[kylef]

Exactly... this is part of the convergence effort to unify the Phone, Desktop, and Surface versions of the Windows OS. The latter two are fairly unified, but the former is still substantially different.

Re:so....

[Penguinisto]

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature.
(think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

Re:so....

[dagamer34]

Actually, it's not. AppNap enables the OS to wake up and have apps refresh their state (enabling more functionality). Battery Saver on the other hand clamps down on apps which periodically refresh when battery is low because a dead battery is useless to the consumer.

Re:so....

[LordThyGod]

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature. (think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

Sounds a lot like the Android platform things that's been around for awhile. You configure battery life left, and a bunch of stuff that you can limit if its below that point.

What about linux and browsers

[Blaskowicz]

surely something could be done, even for desktops. Most time you leave the PC idle, there's the browser using a lot of CPU cycles just to stand still - typically an idle browser is the most consuming process or group of processes, even when you use the computer for something else.

A "battery saver" GUI would be useful, whether I have a battery or not, so that it can limit the browser by using cgroups (probably) to e.g. forbid it using more than 5% CPU or 0.5% CPU. I wonder how many kilowatt-hours are wasted by idling browsers.

Re:so....

[hairyfeet]

For those Windows users that want a similar battery boost (something I've been enjoying for a couple of years now) just pick up a copy of Tuneup Utilities which has "Economy Mode" which does the same thing, and just like Battery Saver you can tell it to only run when on battery or you can manually turn it on and off.

As for TFA? I'm always for MSFT adding useful features and so far running the previous build on my netbook Windows 10 is shaping up to be what Win 8 SHOULD have been with the OPTION to run Metro if you are on a tablet (or using it for an HTPC, as I've always said Metro makes a good 10 foot UI) while the desktop is Win 7 with speed increases. Thanks to 8GadgetPack I even got to keep my fav gadgets. Now if only somebody would figure out how to copy DVD Maker over from Win 7 it'd be perfect, otherwise I'll have to keep one system with Win 7 just for turning customer's vids into DVDs. But otherwise 2 thumbs up for Win10.

Re:so....

[morgauxo]

Yah, would that be the "if your battery is at less than 99% everything is going to go slow and suck" feature?

Are we going to get

[Ravaldy]

Are we going to get an article for every new feature released in Windows 10?

Re: so....

[jsveiga]

Android 5.0 (lollipop) made this a native feature.

Re:so....

[unixisc]

Is there really much work to do on Windows 10, other than getting the Windows 7 interface back for laptop mode, and giving people the option of choosing their UI? How much of an overhaul will this have to be?

Re:so....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is a feature that's been a part of Windows Phone since version 7, released back in 2010, which predates AppNap as it was introduced with OSX Mavericks back in 2013. Microsoft is in the process of unifying the Windows kernel so that it can run phone-table-desktop-server all with compatible executables. Apple copied Microsoft on this one.

Re:so....

[LordThyGod]

Yah, would that be the "if your battery is at less than 99% everything is going to go slow and suck" feature?

That is purely device dependent. Some Android hardware sucks out loud for sure.

No new builds?

[GigaplexNZ]

Considering that this build was not supposed to make its way out of Redmond and that the company is not releasing any new builds this year, this may be the best look we get until the Consumer Preview arrives.

If they're not releasing new builds, why did they recently introduce the fast/slow opt-in mode for how quickly you get access to the new builds?

who puts windows on a mobile device?

[gelfling]

Retards? Monkeys?

Re:so....

[perryizgr8]

Like Nexus 5? Because it lags out like hell once you turn on the battery saver.

So new!

[bobmajdakjr]

And yet it has been in WP8 for a while now. It is mostly useful for missing all your notifications.