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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#11

Post by kyberias »

hcho wrote: post #2

The short answer is polling. There's nothing better at draining a battery than infinite loops waiting for something to happen. I bet Windows have too many of those, remnant from the days where power consumption didn't matter because your PC is plugged into a socket at all times.

I'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious GUESS.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#12

Post by sch1zo »

I guess one problem is comparing apples with oranges. Meaning we can't compare Windows to OSX on the exact same hardware. The closest we get is running Windows via Bootcamp on a Macbook which seems to have its own issues (I don't have a Macbook but have read that multiple times.)

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#13

Post by fetbaffe »

hcho wrote: post #2

The short answer is polling. There's nothing better at draining a battery than infinite loops waiting for something to happen. I bet Windows have too many of those, remnant from the days where power consumption didn't matter because your PC is plugged into a socket at all times.

Maybe all that legacy support that historically helped Microsoft to get marketshare dominance now is paying its hefty price. TANSTAAFL.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#14

Post by snird »

vyoming999 wrote: post #9
artagnon wrote: post #5

I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.

Aren't all the andorid devices mentioned inherently run on linux ?

I think he meant a full OS comparable to Windows 7 and OS X, let's say Ubuntu or Fedora for that matter.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#16

Post by da_n »

Anecdotal, but on an older 11" MacBook Air I have a dual-boot with elementary OS (Ubuntu derivative) and I get around 20-30% better battery life with Linux than OS X (using laptop-mode-tools etc). I think this is probably due to all the iCloud crap going on with OS X these days, but I have no proof of that.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#17

Post by ekianjo »

wielebny wrote: post #10
artagnon wrote: post #5

I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.

Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.

Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#18

Post by wldlyinaccurate »

artagnon wrote: post #5

I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.

Depending on the window manager, there are reports[1] of Linux achieving better battery life than OSX. That's not surprising though, as a lightweight WM like i3 is going to use much less resource than OSX's shiny interface.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1jjdi8/ultrabook_with...

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#19

Post by M4v3R »

eknkc wrote: post #4

I wonder if Maverics will widen the gap further. It has that app suspension thing when some window goes invisible. Also there are some decent performance improvements that would mean less cpu usage (or bursts of them, which is more power efficient). Are there any benchmarks? Or is it still behind NDA?

There are probably no benchmarks yet, but from my experience (I use both 10.8 and 10.9 regularly) Mavericks does a better job on battery than Mountain Lion, with about 1 hour of usage added. This is on 2012, 13" Air. The 2013 model will probably see even better gains.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#20

Post by ygra »

eknkc wrote: post #4

I wonder if Maverics will widen the gap further. It has that app suspension thing when some window goes invisible. Also there are some decent performance improvements that would mean less cpu usage (or bursts of them, which is more power efficient). Are there any benchmarks? Or is it still behind NDA?

Strangely enough, my Windows 8.1 managed to suspend everything yesterday. Not only the Metro apps that I didn't use, but also Explorer and every other desktop application I used. Wonder how that happened (although I used to suspend applications manually before if I wanted to pause them somehow, e.g. CPU- or I/O-intense long-running things).
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