Guide to Vista power management
The whole Vista battery drain issue is still raging and I believe it may be due as much to the lack of information about how the power management in Vista as anything else. Having customized my power management settings I still find it harder to know exactly how some of these settings are affecting my battery life, unlike the settings in XP which were pretty much straightforward. Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog points to a guide,
The XP User’s Guide to Windows Vista, Part 7: Power Management and Power Plans
that might help us understand these settings in terms of the settings in XP that we’re more familiar with. Check out this guide and tweak your power management settings and see if you can get that Vista battery life back up to where it was under XP, or better yet even longer.
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Here is a white paper with more info about Vista’s power management than you could ever want to know.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/ProcPowerMgmt.mspx
Bottom line? 47 pages of stuff telling how Vista’s way is different (and better) than XP’s way. And I still can’t get more than 1 1/2 hours of life out of my Q1 with Vista.
My new laptop came with Vista preinstalled so I’ve never had a chance to test its battery life under XP. I do have Ubuntu installed on a small partition, and there doesn’t seem to be any major difference in battery life between Vista and Linux.
So really what it comes down to is I just need to buy an extended battery and make my laptop a little bit heavier to lug around.
I’ve finally characterized the power drain differences between Vista and XP on my Q1. Yes they are real. Also I found a surprising power hog, at least on my device.
Posted here:
http://www.nullstream.com/archives/000471.html