Better Battery Life : Windows 7 for Notebooks and Netbooks

Better Battery Life

By Mary Branscombe, published on November 26, 2008
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Windows, seven, Netbook | Themes: Windows Tech Talk, Business Notebooks

Contents

1. Windows 7 on Netbooks
2. Windows 7 Fits With SSDs
3. Extra SSD Features
4. Better Battery Life
5. Managing the Battery and Optical Drives

4. Better Battery Life

Whether you use a netbook or a larger notebook, Microsoft claims that Windows 7 should deliver improved battery life. Some of this is due to changes in Windows itself. To save power when you’re running Windows 7 on a notebook, Windows will ignore “wake timers” that are supposed to wake the system out of sleep (except for the timer that wakes the notebook up to hibernate when the battery is low)—so you shouldn’t experience your notebook waking in your bag. In future versions of Windows, a notebook will wake on a timer, but only if it’s plugged in when the timer activates.

Windows 7 will also be more aggressive about first dimming and then turning off the screen and spinning down the hard drive to save power; it will ignore CPU utilization and only check for user input and applications that have asked for the system to stay awake, such as for recording TV shows. If you’re working with a file stored on a server or another PC, Windows would stay awake so the file wouldn’t get corrupted. As applications usually have a local cache to work with, open network files will no longer keep Windows 7 awake; and if your machine is streaming a media file to another PC in a HomeGroup, it will only stay awake as long as the file is playing and then sleep as soon as it finishes.

For every ten percent of CPU utilization used, power usage goes up by about 1.25W and battery life goes down by about eight percent. Changing the system timers that used to wake up the processor and reducing the idle activities of drivers and applications should let the processor go into a low-power state more often in Windows 7. Additionally, if your Wi-Fi is turned on, but not connected to a network, Windows will not put it into low-power mode.

Windows 7 has better support for the deep-sleep power-saving mode in the SATA standard. There’s also an option to power down USB ports that aren’t in use, or that are connected to devices that don’t respond when Windows sends information; but this won’t be turned on by default, in case it causes compatibility problems. There are other options for saving power with USB controllers, but hardware manufacturers will need to support and enable them.

4 – Better Battery Life

Previous page Extra SSD Features
Next page Managing the Battery and Optical Drives

Comments | Print | Send to a friend

Related albums

Windows Seven Q&A

Windows 7 Netbook

Microsoft Windows 7 Beta

10 Vista Problems

Comments

Show comments: By default All Good ratings Poor ratings

zodiacfml 11/26/2008 2:59 PM

Hide

i just hope that on the desktop we can turn off windows features.

Anonymous 11/26/2008 4:43 PM

Hide

It looks like my lenovo already has most of these features. And always this discussion about battery life. I have never gotten the advertised battery life is I actually use my laptop. So the screen can not be too dim (let alone outside... what a joke). I actually need the harddrive. So much of these features don't seem that interesting. What is really new in Windows 7. (all the features for OEM's... do I care if I already have it?).
The easier networking. Interesting. didn't XP show you the wi-fi networks with one click. And then in Vista they removed it. So now it is a feature again? Come on...
An 8Gb footprint for barebones windows. What is that all about. I can run XP easily on a 10Gb drive. And it needs only about 2Gb. So where is the progress here...???
Overall from what I read: not much new stuff.
Sounds like lots of these are already in XP... Should compare battery life with XP, not vista I guess....
And would love to see a comparison on some of these tasks with an Apple. Just to know if it will be worth my money to switch.

Anonymous 11/26/2008 7:19 PM

Hide

-1

I've played around with Vista a bit, but glad I skipped implementing it as my main OS.

hellwig 11/26/2008 8:14 PM

Hide

-1

Same here with skipping Vista. I had plenty of driver-incompatability fun when I switched to Win XP Pro x64 (for the heck of it). I figured I would just skip the whole Vista issue entirely. If Windows 7 needs less hardware than the 2-year old Vista it is based on, it just further shows how unnecessary Vista was. Looks like the wait for Windows 7 will be well worth it.

Anonymous 11/27/2008 7:29 AM

Hide

what about tablet features?
to my understanding the 7 OS supports active, passive, wacom technology and multitouch options much better then the Vista did.
Since the vista did (does) it well, i wonder how much better will the 7 be on my tablet-pc...

Anonymous 11/28/2008 1:21 PM

Hide

Windows 7 IS Vista with options to strip down unnecessary parts and with some tuning done. But most important, with completely new marketing! And people will pay for something that they should already have when they bought Vista. Smart Microsoft is and that's why they're rich.

Anonymous 11/28/2008 5:22 PM

Hide

That's right medmeks..

So, Why don't we make another class action lawsuits against Ballmer and his god-damned Microsoft?

Anonymous 11/29/2008 9:19 PM

Hide

I agree with medmeks... it is just an updated version of vista as said by Microsoft themselves...because the update was so big they deemed it release. But then Apple charge for each of their big updates every time...so nothing new here...Mircosoft copying Apple??

I run Vista as my main OS now having bought a copy upgraded from XP. I think it is great and have had zero issues with it in 3 months... i have a macbook too but will be selling soon as i dont use it enough - XBOX 360 etc.

jkeelsnc 11/30/2008 10:40 PM

Hide

This is all good. I finally started using Vista recently and after SP1 it is acceptable (finally). However, this still begs a question. Why the hell didn't Microsoft write Vista with these features to begin with to allow it to run properly on smaller machines and less hardware? I understand that SSD's were not popular at the time but the rest of the features could have been implemented. Not to mention they should checked on the hardware and software compatabilities before shoving it out the door. Having said that, VISTA is finally pretty good and it looks like Windows 7 will actually be very nice.

Anonymous 12/02/2008 2:46 PM

Hide

vista is a rushed product - that's why...

Anonymous 04/08/2009 7:14 AM

Hide

Comments are closed on this page.

	13.3" MacBook Pro Notebook (2.26GHz...	$1149.00 MacConnection More info
	5800 XpressMusic Black Smartphone...	$259.99 Dell Small Business More info
	Vostro A90 Netbook (1.6GHz Intel Atom...	$219.00 Dell Small Business Systems More info
	iPhone 3G Black Cell Phone (GSM,...	$49.00 AT&T More info
	VAIO VGN-NW270F/S Notebook (2.2GHz...	$649.98 STAPLES More info

Top Stories

Popular Searches

Better Battery Life

4. Better Battery Life

Related albums

Sponsored links

Comments

Sponsored links