Surely this doesn't just affect mobile devices. If the OS causes a higher power drain, then it must be more expensive to run a Windows server than an OS X/Linux server.
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
41–50 of 329 posts
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#42Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.
Yes, that's the correct answer. This problem today, on tablets especially, also comes from Microsoft's unwilling to use anything other than the full Windows on almost any product they have. So instead of starting something from scratch, they'd rather force all that legacy bloatware into devices that need very efficient software and have smaller batteries.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.
why not? besides having a LINUX kernel, it runs a lot of GNU linux programs such as GNU coreutils...
That's not true, the Android userland is not GNU. It's probably possible to compile some of the GNU tools to work with the bionic libc but it's not the default userland.
I think it's fair to say Android is running on Linux, it's just not GNU/Linux.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#44Microsoft turned Windows 95 into a full-fledged multi-user operating system. Segmented user space? Unix had done that for years. All users where admin and it was horrible, but lot's of apps ran on it, so people bought it and used it. Then they merged Win95 into WinNT and gave us Windows 2000. Now they are turning a full-fledged multi-user OS into a tablet OS. Let's make this tank into a bicycle. History tells us ther…
Apple manged to turn a multi-user OS into a tablet OS, why can't Microsoft do it? The actual NT kernel is supposedly hardware-agnostic.
I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers.
For whatever reason they have not made power management a priority since then, maybe because it was easy (and at least somewhat correct) to blame 3rd party drivers. But in the Surface devices they have the same "known target" that Apple has always had with their hardware, so they should have been able to optimize for that, if they had wanted to.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#45Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components and Windows doesn't know how to call them.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people? The article points out the Surface 2. Software and hardware developed by MS and it still has bad battery life when compared with Nexus 7 and iPad (it has half the battery life of the Nexus 7).
But Surface 2 Pro runs on a Haswell, its much more powerful than any Android tablet
How much will a user notice that performance difference in everyday use? Maybe they are putting in more power than is needed. Also the Surface RT battery performance is just as bad and it's running ARM I think.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#47Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.
Yes, that's the correct answer. This problem today, on tablets especially, also comes from Microsoft's unwilling to use anything other than the full Windows on almost any product they have. So instead of starting something from scratch, they'd rather force all that legacy bloatware into devices that need very efficient software and have smaller batteries.
Therein lies the problem: Full windows is the only kind of windows there is. Today you still cannot boot a windows server without a GUI layer. Windows is utterly monolithic.
Apple were able to rip the top layers off OSX and ship it as iOS without too much trouble, because it's unix. (They didn't start from scratch.)
Windows, not so much. MS have been trying to do it for a decade or more, and they've failed for the reasons outlined by optymizer.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#48Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.
Valuable legacy windows programs can run on a tablet. From my perspective that shows that MS cares. Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.
Why would you need "legacy apps" on a tablet?
The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems:
1) apps not optimized for touch
2) OS not optimized for touch
3) expensive hardware
4) inefficient hardware/small battery life
It seems to me that with devices like Surface Pro, the 1) and 3) problems are still ported to the new devices. I don't see legacy apps that aren't optimized for touch and on a 10" screen, as an "advantage" for Windows tablets. For all practical purposes, they are not.
Even if you want to do "work" with legacy apps when in "laptop mode" - are you sure you want to do that on a 10" screen? Because I'm telling you 10" is too small for productive work, and the keyboard is too crammed at that size.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#49I 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?
I'm seeing around 1 to 1.5 more hours of operation on Mavericks on a 2012 Macbook Air 11". Now, that is not for web browsing but for development & debugging with Xcode, so I'm usually never reaching these marvellous 6+ hour rates, but with Mavericks it went basically from 3-4 hours to 4-6 hours, which is fantastic.
I'm pretty sure that that will only widen the gap between OSX and Windows on Laptop hardware.
The 13" Macbook Air could then theoretically reach 17 hours of operation time!
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#50The 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.
It's not really a guess. Anyone who worked with power constrained devices would tell you it's because of polling.
If I told you the biggest culprit is component xyz, that would be a guess.