Vista battery drain: UMPCs vs. notebooks
Quite the debate going about Vista and battery life. On the one hand, CNET is hitting the topic hard today and I’ve read a number of similar articles and comments about Vista draining notebook batteries faster. On the other hand, Frank (aka: Ctitanic) calls the whole issue a myth and plans to debunk it with some testing.
Currently, I only have Vista on a desktop (which isn’t applicable to this) and on UMPCs where, like Frank, I haven’t noticed any problem. There’s one item that I suspect Frank is overlooking: most reports indicated that when turning the Aero graphics features off on Vista, battery life was back to ‘normal’. Since we’re not running the Aero features on our UMPCs, my take is that we wouldn’t see the issue. Time and testing will tell, so I’ll take a wait-and-see approach for now. Meanwhile: care to share your power experiences under Vista on a notebook or UMPC?
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You got a point, there with AERO, but like I mentioned at GottabeMobile, I have noticed that when I used the Battery saving Vista profile I was getting less battery life than when I started to use the Samsung’s Optimized Profile.
I find out there is a stark difference between a preinstalled Vista and manual installed vista. For example, I install Vista business on my T4215 Fujitsu, it does have battery life drop and extra heat. However, the my R400 Toshiba with preinstalled Vista buiness, lasts average to 3 to 3.5 hours in standard battery which does much better than another of my tablet, X60 with standard battery. So I expect if you buy a vista copy and install it on your XP version, that will be the case. But R400 has no problem at all, for me, it seems like Microsoft simply has to give a patch for XP to Vista transition. However, for its future market, since all vista is preinstalled, I hope there will be no problems :)
Frank, why don’t you post the individual settings changes that Samsung Optimized makes?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39128821@N00/sets/72157600178282474/
Since Vista was released in January I’ve installed it on a Thinkpad T60, 2 X60Ts, and a Dell D420. On all four machines the battery life on Vista is approximately 20 % worse than XP. I configured Vista to use the least amount of energy by turning off Aero, the sidebar, and modifying the power profile.
It’s pretty obvious in my experience to me that Vista is a battery hog. Doing a side by side of the two OS’s running on the machine in the same manner is pretty cut and dry.
I believe it is something fairly simple and M$ should be able to release a patch to fix it in due time. Has everyone forgotten the USB patch that M$ had to release to fix a power zapping bug in XP? The flaw was in XP for years but didn’t become obvious until the Core Duo CPUs arrived. M$ had known about the issue for years but didn’t do anything about it until enough people started complaining. Anyone who has spent more than a few hours using Vista can plainly see that M$ rushed Vista out the door. It’s probably the buggiest OS since WinME and that is saying alot.
M$ needs to spend more time optimizing their OS’s to take advantage of power saving abilites of the hardware. A simple test to prove that M$ can do better is to compare a Macbook/MBP running OSX vs the same machine running bootcamp and XP/Vista. When running OSX the machine will run longer on battery than when on XP/Vista. This is just doing simple tasks that allows the hardware to power down when possible. Obviously results will change when pushing the hardware since it’s not allowed to idle. The same machine also tends to run hotter while running XP/Vista (fans are hardware controlled).
I must admit that I was mystified when everybody started blaming the Aero interface as two machines that I ran Vista on had a noticeable drop in battery life and neither were capable of running Aero!
I think they need to look elsewhere for a solution. Maybe to Frank (Ctitanic)? :)
Did you check Samsung’s Optimized Profile? The one I linked in my previous Post?
My R2H does quite well with battery life in Vista. I haven’t compared it to XP, I must admit. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my wireless card rarely works in Vista, but I do end up using an external stick. Vista’s sleep seems to do loads better than XP’s Standby, too. I always reconfigure the power settings, myself.
Now my Tablet PC might be a different story, but it’s hard to tell. I’m using my original battery most of the time, though I had bought a second a long time ago, when I’d noticed a decrease in charge life. If I’m using it on the go, I sometimes have my AirCard in it, which is a noticeable drain on the battery.
Well this debate has spewed across several blogs / forums now. I take issue with Frank’s term ‘myth’ since the best I can get with my Q1 and Vista is 1:30 of life, while I can boot into XP and perform the same tasks (on the maximum power profile) and get nearly 2:00. I prefer to call it a mystery, and I would rather we all put energy into trying to figure out why ‘some’ of us lost battery life after moving to Vista and some did not. I have ‘measured’ this life by actually running the machine until it forces itself to hibernate with 3% battery life left – I’m not actually trusting what the battery life estimate is after running for 30 minutes or so. I have been tweaking and testing for a couple weeks now. I’ve been disabling services, killing tasks etc, and still the best I have managed was 1 hour and 33 minutes under Vista.
Yes I’m running the Samsung power profile. My setting exactly match those that Frank posted on flicker with the exception that I let the machine run down to 3% instead of 5% to try and squeeze a few minutes more out of it.
I installed Vista Ultimate on a new partition (XP Tablet is still installed so I can make comparisions). I installed the drivers from this page, according to the instructions:
http://psybertech.net/Q1Files/filelist.htm
I excluded the VBS script and installed the Beta HID drivers provided by Frank.
At this point I’m open to any suggestions.
I simply gave up on vista. Battery life is too valuable for me to mess with Vista right now…I’ve installed vista on my laptop and sammy q1 and both system are reverted back to XP due to power drain faster, approx 30% lost of power just running vista. I’ve used “classic” insterface, and disabled search indexing, sidebar, and other non essential services and apps…still very very little improvements other than a bit snappier screen.
I’m been searching for a reason as well…Vista is really not ready for prime time on laptop. My cpu monitor spikes to 90%-100% constantly even during idle. There are just too much stuff running in the background killing my cpu.