Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Windows, 7, Battery, Life | Themes: Business Notebooks
Microsoft is seeking to improve battery life for notebooks with Windows 7.
As PDC2008 continues on this week, Windows 7 is a topic garnering plenty of attention. Although the new taskbar is pretty and all, a monumentally more important aspect of Windows 7 is arguably the improved battery life it will offer notebooks. With notebooks now outselling desktop computers, increased mobile performance is a feature that many will greatly appreciate.
According to Extremetech, Windows 7 will feature a power audit tool that will help users improve their notebook battery life and reduce energy usage. While dimming a screen’s brightness is one simple way to save power, Microsoft realizes that there are also other more advanced methods of reducing power consumption, such as increasing the system timer. By increasing the system timer from 1ms to 15.6ms, battery life can be increased by 10-percent. We have yet to be see how this will work in practice, but one would imagine that altering the system timer too much could result in a less responsive system or choppy performance. During moments of idle usage however, dynamically altering the system timer to improve battery life could make a lot of sense.
As recently discovered by Anandtech, it was unexpectedly found during tests with the new Apple MacBooks that battery life was more than doubled when using the Apple Mac OS X than when compared to using Windows Vista. While wireless Internet browsing for example, a MacBook Air could achieve 4.98-hours of battery life, but when using Windows Vista on the same notebook, only 2.55-hours could be achieved. This result still remains largely unexplained and is a startling find.
Although there are likely many reasons why Windows Vista offers comparably poor battery performance, one reason might be in regards to the legacy support Windows is known to provide. If this is the case, it might be fundamentally more difficult for Microsoft to implement the same level of battery life that Mac OS X is capable of. A more modularized Windows could be one way to overcome this issue, and we have been hearing Windows 7 will indeed be more modularized, so there is further hope.
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Anandtech has yet to verify their result with a similarly spec. PC so I don't know how you arrived at that conclusion. The fact that Vista doesn’t have a power profile for Mac should be obvious.
Vista got poor battery life on the macbook air because the macbook isnt optimized for vista, its not so "largely unexplained" as you called it.
if your still unsure, just look at all the laptops that use a similar speced battery and run vista, and get similar battery life as the macbook.
Umm, sucky drivers for the MAC from apple? Oh wait, is it still cool to bash Vista?
I guess on top of writing biased articles without proper research Tomshardware also can't do simple arithmetic because 4.98 is very obviously not "more than" double 2.55.
tipoo - try reading Anandtech's article. And Tom's - please do arithmetic correctly.
SanFrenchysco says:
However blown up this XP vs. OSX article seems there is A LOT of existing truth caused by underlying Windows flaws.
Some core code run by XP and Vista is way "sub-optimal" - If it did not only affect performance, I'd call that a "P1" bug because it's broken and lumping along. The outcome is even fresh Windows systems are more sluggish and power hungry than they should even.
The performance pay-offs ring in the range of 15 to 25%: snappy system, cooler CPU, great battery and energy bill savings.
Reasons why I can't post patches:
1- Some of the problem happen right from install time. To deploy related fixes involves either fixing a Ghost master source or patching the source code in Redmond.
2- Lots of hard work put me in position to write a valuable white paper on the root cause analysis with fixes applicable from servers to desktops. Fixes for WinMobile PDA/PNA are different.
3- It took years of research and analysis to develop genuine working fixes for problems to this day continue to plague Vista and very likely Win7 due to shared code.
SF/.
tipoo - try reading Anandtech's article. And Tom's - please do arithmetic correctly.
I did read the article, whats your point? They had OSX and vista running on a macbook, geuss which would be more optimised for the macbook?