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Vista RC2 vs. WinXP on notebooks

P

Parasitic

Diamond Member
My laptop is getting clogged up and it's about time for a reformat; however, this time I'm thinking about loading Vista on it (for experimentation) instead of WinXP. I'm not too worried about performance issues (the laptop is plenty fast and only my secondary machine) but I'm concerned about battery life. Vista is as a whole bulkier than WinXP and requires more resources, but does it have different sorts of optimization for notebooks that may enhance the battery life?


Has anybody done anything like me or observed differences?
 
Battery life, I can just about assure you there will be less life. It's comparing apples to oranges, but one thing is for certain; I just set up a Dell D600 with Vista for my wife (she likes the new games on it). That D600 gets EXTREMELY hot to touch on the bottom side, as in you will likely burn yourself hot. It's not the battery that's this hot, it's the CPU, chipset and RAM.

My guess is that Vista is not properly implementing Speedstep and thus running the laptop at 100%. This would in turn lead to severely degraded battery life.
 
And, using the Aero Glass imagery has been tested to definitely consume more battery power and thus shorten battery life.
 
Originally posted by: SunnyD
Battery life, I can just about assure you there will be less life. It's comparing apples to oranges, but one thing is for certain; I just set up a Dell D600 with Vista for my wife (she likes the new games on it). That D600 gets EXTREMELY hot to touch on the bottom side, as in you will likely burn yourself hot. It's not the battery that's this hot, it's the CPU, chipset and RAM.

My guess is that Vista is not properly implementing Speedstep and thus running the laptop at 100%. This would in turn lead to severely degraded battery life.
Click to expand...

Yeah, Vista SP2 has some serious power management problems. I was using up 100% of the cpu just playing back videos in WMP11. I think that speedstep was lowering the processor speed for some reason and now allowing it to run at full speed.
 
Oh yes. MUCH less battery life.

I noticed this under Vista in the Beta, but it has only gotten marginally better under RC2. I have a compaq v5000z with a 12 cell battery (~5 hours under XP) that gets about half that under Vista with everything pretty on the most portable of battery settings. It's definetly a power hog. I think i read somewhere that if you have an AMD chip, there is a driver update to fix a bug where the cpu wouldt return to low power states under certain circumstances. That may be the problem.
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
And, using the Aero Glass imagery has been tested to definitely consume more battery power and thus shorten battery life.
Click to expand...

Makes sense. Aero pushes the GPU constantly, and if you have a high power GPU (say a GeForce Go!) you can bet battery life is gonna suffer.

Solution: dump Aero on a laptop. Or plug it in :laugh:
 
Originally posted by: Pabster
Solution: dump Aero on a laptop. Or plug it in :laugh:
Click to expand...

Yeah - that'll work. Actually, Aero brings nada to the party for a working computer - it is fluff for gamers and kids who like to be awestruck by eye candy. 🙂

 
In the RTM version running on my Dell E1505, battery life is reduced by and hour and a half. In XP I could get 3:30 hours off a full charge. In Vista RTM, that's reduced to 2 hours of runtime. Unacceptable.
 
I haven't noticed any battery issues in RTM. I'm getting a little over 5 hours with my Dell D620 with the 9-cell battery. This is with Aero glass, wireless, blah blah.

I never had XP on this system though, so I can't really compare.
 
I haven't noticed any difference with my Dell I5100 and the RTM. It runs about 2.5 hours on XP and about the same on Vista, Note: this laptop uses a P4 Desktop 2.66Mhz CPU. Not running Aero Glass though.

pcgeek11
 
Under RTM I'm getting roughly equivalent on my Thinkpad T43 (~3 hours); Aero glass is running, but it's not that powerful of a chipset (X300).

As was mentioned before depending on what you're doing YMMV.
 
There were known issues in pre-RTM that GREATLY shortened battery life.


Don't load anything pre-RTM.
 
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