Windows 7 slashes netbook battery life by a third

[Steve]

Thanks Rik

[Technical Ben]

Um, that makes no sense there Stevethegas. As software should not change a future state of the hardware, if you replace the software (did I explain that badly?). I too would like to see a vista/7 comparison as they are quite different from XP. It's like running explorer and Crysis the game and saying the game uses more power to run.

So it sounds more like a driver bug on an unreleased candidate (hence it still being beta). Perhaps the vista rig had a better driver for running the laptop and it's power consumption.

It could be really simple like power settings turned off by default, power stepping in the processor not enabled, or just a processor/gpu hungry gui. Oh, or alot of HDD use. Should all be easily fixable.

[Sebby]

I can't imagine that W7 has a higher hard drive usage than Vista!

[Rik]

Play John Lennon, Seb, it might help.

[Sebby]

Vista is beyond help.

[Rik]

 

[Gary]

Vista is beyond help.

Vista works just fine   

[esh]

When SP2 for XP came out it made a huge dent in battery life because of a long-standing bug where it constantly gave max power to all USB devices instead of degrading the power class as per requested. It was fixed. Still, I imagine W7 will always use more power if you are using a non-GDI graphics rendering base, like Aero, as it requires some form of graphical acceleration.

[Glenn]

Microsoft says that extensive testing and conversations with OEMs indicate that Windows 7 is handling notebook batteries exactly as intended - despite user claims that upgrades to the new OS have caused significant degradation to battery life.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/08/microsoft_on_windows_7_battery_complaints/

[Technical Ben]

Shock! News just in.
Piling on the eye candy burns up your calorific stores!*



*The extra fancy effects in Windows 7 uses more processor power, and thus more battery power.