June 2, 2006 4:00 AM PDT
Vista beta sucks up battery juice
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With the new version of Windows, Microsoft has created an operating system that offers advances in many areas, but laptop battery life is not one of them. Going by internal tests at one hardware maker, which declined to be named, there is noticeably lower battery life when Vista runs in its "average power" mode.
Microsoft has said that the current versions of the update deliver less battery life than Windows XP, but the company has also said it hopes to close the gap in the coming months.
One of Vista's most visible changes is its Aero interface, which offers spiffier graphics when people navigate through the operating system. Its advanced Aero Glass effects include translucent windows and animated transitions, as well as the ability to move between windows and documents by selecting from miniature versions of those items.
"Doing all of those wonderful things that (the Aero Glass effect) allows, you are going to end up burning more milliwatts," said chip analyst Nathan Brookwood.
Even so, any lowering in battery life is a blow to the rest of the PC industry. Manufacturers have found it a struggle to boost the battery life of notebook computers, even as they've made easy advances in other areas, such as disk space and processor performance.
"Just when they thought they were getting closer, now they are further away," Brookwood said. Several hardware makers contacted by CNET News.com declined to comment.
Microsoft acknowledged that Vista's more intense graphics do cause a hit to battery life.
"The Windows Vista Aero theme and components which implement it can use more resources than previous versions of the operating system," Microsoft product manager Mike Burk said in a statement.
The company said it is working with PC makers to ensure that systems are better able to handle the change. "As a result, the impact on battery life is small," Burk said. However, the company would not say how it might solve the battery woes.
Polishing Vista
Improving Vista's battery life is just one of many things Microsoft is trying to do between today's test version and the final release of the new operating system. The software maker is looking to wrap up its development work this year, though, which means a tight deadline for fixing bugs and improving things like raw performance and power use.
Jim Allchin, co-president of the Microsoft unit that includes Windows, said battery life is not on the top of his list of worries.
"In terms of battery life, no...that's not one that's at my concern level," he said during a recent interview.
The company is still tweaking some settings, such as the degree to which Vista's built-in search engine indexes files while on battery power, and how often it does so. Microsoft has already made some decisions that won't show up publicly until the next major test version of Vista is released.
For those who want more battery life than Vista can deliver in all its glory, Microsoft suggests they switch to the "basic" theme in Vista. "Basic" strips out things like the Flip3D feature (for graphically switching among open windows) and the application thumbnails (which make the icon for a file a replica of the picture or document itself).
Another area that holds some promise is Vista's support for hybrid hard drives. These are traditional hard discs augmented by a significant amount of flash memory, which is less power-hungry than a standard hard drive. Samsung, which is building a hybrid hard drive, has said the feature gives notebook users an extra half hour of battery life.
Microsoft executives also said they hope to get better battery life--near Windows XP levels--by the time Vista is completed. However, the company has set itself other goals that have ended up falling by the wayside.
For example, Microsoft at one time thought it could eventually get Vista to run on machines with as little as 128MB of memory. When the system requirements came out last month, Vista instead required 512MB of memory--the same as Microsoft has called for all along.
Hot topic
Beyond the battery life question, there is also the matter of the heat generated by the graphics chips and other components, which work full throttle even doing basic tasks.
Robert McLaws, who runs Vista enthusiast site Longhornblogs.com, said that his Toshiba Tecra M4 has been generating considerably more heat running the operating system beta.
"A lot of these laptops weren't designed to have all that power all the time," he said.
Microsoft said it hasn't seen significant heat problems in its testing.
"We've been testing Windows Vista-based PCs in real-world 'worst-case' scenarios that push hardware theoretical maximum temperatures," Burk said. "Our tests involved 3D games, CAD applications and the like, and in each case revealed no major problems with hardware heat management."
The company did say it has "received a few isolated reports of bugs in services or applications which cause high CPU or disk utilization in Beta 2." It added, however, that none of the reports "characterize the heat levels as excessive to the point of damaging the system."
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Here's a hint: disable Themes in XP and see how it affects your battery life, you will be surprised.
One great negative of the Microsoft OS monopoly is that it is a waste-inefficient business model that continues to create millions of junked PCs, and new generations of power hogs that suck up ever more watts with each PC generation.
For example, a 700 MHz PIII we use for backup storage by spec has a CPU that uses something like 55 watts top usage; one of our current systems now uses according to specs some 500 watts in CPU power at max CPU load.
At a time of dramatically rising energy costs and increasingly scarce energy supply, we should ask why this insanity is allowed.
Moreover, one arae that could benefit by regulation would be all battery-powered devices. A heavy energy tax on battery-powered devices, and also batteries, would discourage this highly inefficient power model.
Since battery power can be up to thousands of times less efficient than line power in terms of its total opportunity costs for creation and delivery (I saw one report a few years ago noting that alkaline batteries are something like 5,000 times more costly in terms of price and resources used per power unit that line power), we also must ask why we encourage rather than regulate the use of battery-powered devices.
Windows Media Player, I wondered what effect displaying
everything as a graphic would have on battery life. I guess this
article answers that question.
As a Vista Beta tester in good standing, I was viewing important Apps. data, research, and even my email. While running Vista, I randomly check the battery life status. On one case in point, I noticed a low battery alert of about 15 minutes. I decided to shutdown and Load Windows XP Pro SP2 from the other partition. I then observed that the battery status was > 25 minutes. Hmmm.
I do have a spare battery and of course the AC power adapter, but felt this was a way to later get a better charge on that routine.
On another unrelated instance, I also fell asleep with the Laptop like one of the CNET staff did. Go figure!
Ron
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000829&pageNumber=1>
Regarding the extra heat generated by running Aero, make sure you test drive that new laptop in a quiet room before plunking down your hard earned cash. My laptop's fan sounds like a hair dryer when it is at maximum cooling RPM. I could not stand to listen to that for an extended period by running Vista.
windows? I'm a Mac user and am used to this already. I've been
using Unsanity's WindowShade X for over a year now, which
allows me to make windows transparent and minimized in place.
OS X already has that 3D effect when you do fast user
switching.. I bet that they will use that for regular window effects
in Leopard.
Bottom line:
Mac OS X already has those glitzy and glamorous features sans a
hit to battery life. Windows users should use Mac OS X before
getting too excited about the Aero effects.
For a comparison I looked at the HP dv1000t series notebook. It rated up to 8.75 hours on a 12 cell extended battery. Now take into account that HP offers the T2300, Apple only offers the T2600 on the 17? MacBook pro, and that 8.75 hour battery life is probably based on the low end processor.
Now finally I come to my conclusion. If Apple can make an operating system that offers all the glitz and glamour, for several years I might add, that Microsoft is finally trying to integrate into Vista, why is Microsoft the dominate OS? Obviously Microsoft has become too big to consider how they should solve all their problems. Microsoft should quit trying to lock everyone out of operating system by making it difficult for vendors to properly integrate new code into windows and leave it more up to the hardware vendors to supply drivers. Now I?m not talking about making Windows open source. All I?m saying is that Microsoft should stick to making an operating system and leave all the smaller tasks to the people that know how to do it best. If MS did then I believe that we would see a leaner, more stable OS come from them that would be difficult to rival by any.
But then again, who knows. Maybe I?m just being fallacious. If things were so simple then we wouldn?t have anything to comment on.
I guess soon we will see Operating systems and Aps that's 4gig in size, processor speed up to 8 gigs and our battery in our laptop max at 4 hours, lol.
- Laptop Battery Help
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by GreenApple123
August 15, 2006 3:36 PM PDT
- I was having a lot of problems with my laptop holding a charge, I wasn't running Vista but I was running lots of photo editing and imaging software like Photoshop 7.0. By the end of my frustration my battery would barely hold a charge at all. A friend of mine told me that he got a laptop battery at a website called http://www.laptopsforless.com/laptopbattery for really cheap so I checked it out. I ended up getting a brand new battery for cheap and it has been holding a charge better than the original ever did. I would recommend checking out the site if you are fed up with your battery all together. Hope it helps.
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