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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#151

Post by usaphp »

tluyben2 wrote: post #112
bosie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet) mind sharing why you think it is a joke of a tablet?

Unless the Surface Pro 2 is significantly improved over the 1, which it doesn't look like it is from reading the reviews, it is a joke to be honest. Everyone keeps saying it's a 'real computer'; so why didn't you buy a laptop then? I worked on the 1 for about 2 weeks; the keyboard drove me insane as did the battery life. I didn't like how it stands up compared to a laptop and for some reason the screen wasn't as resp…

> the keyboard drove me insane as did the battery life

They've improved a battery life to 7 hours of browsing, it's even more than many other windows laptops out there. Are you talking about type cover? If yes, than what exactly drove you insane? It works find for me.

> I didn't like how it stands up compared to a laptop

They've added a new stand position which will satisfy those who are looking for laptop-like stand

> For the price of these things I don't really see why anyone would buy one unless you have way too much money to spare on toys.

It costs as much as macbook air but has a touch screen and a tablet form factor, it might fit a lot of people who don't want to carry around macbook air + ipad but want a single device.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#152

Post by nathan_long »

mistermann wrote: post #105
blinkingled wrote: post #93

Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. The drivers too. Microsoft doesn't write their own drivers and then there's firmware too. It's the one area where Apple has really taken advantage of the vertical integration - they do everything from firmware to most apps people use. But both Windo…

> But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Like Google showed with the Nexus 7 - focus is all that's needed. It's just harder for Microsoft considering everything they need to juggle. Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this. Identify the problem and we will support your findings to get the fix implemented." It's not like they lack the financial means. I just don't think there…

>> Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this.

The article says that "if you take the latest and greatest 13" MacBook Air, and install Windows 8 on it", the battery life goes from 14:25 to 7:40.

It's unlikely a single fix. Probably everything from drivers to GUIs would have to be made more efficient to close the gap.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#153

Post by corresation »

kyberias wrote: post #11
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.

It might be a guess, but it's one that we know is almost certainly correct. Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life.

Windows is an eminently pluggable system, fully able to take advantage of low power states in hardware, ACPI, etc. Fundamentally there is no reason for it to be a power pig. But it is, because the choices made in it were made for a different world of computing.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#154

Post by theandrewbailey »

nbevans wrote: post #146
dsr_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course the smashing success of WinFS.

I don't really think that WinFS was a core OS kernel feature. It was built on top of SQL Server, so I doubt it even had a kernel-mode component either. ReFS would be a better example. And that's just another example of how Microsoft is keeping their core technology up to date. Apple meanwhile is still using HFS+ which even Linus Torvalds called out as being utterly crap.

What doesn't Tovalds call out as being utterly crap?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#155

Post by macspoofing »

blinkingled wrote: post #93

Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. The drivers too. Microsoft doesn't write their own drivers and then there's firmware too. It's the one area where Apple has really taken advantage of the vertical integration - they do everything from firmware to most apps people use. But both Windo…

>Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life.

What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?

Come on.

>But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted.

Bingo. So the questions stands, given that the consumer market is a huge priority for Microsoft and that iPads and iPhones and Android devices represent some of the biggest competition for Microsoft, why haven't they done this already?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#156

Post by DanBC »

mitchty wrote: post #133
__david__ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know they still use the Darwin kernel in iOS. Which means it scales from desktops and servers all the way down to phones... That seems pretty general purpose to me.

Additionally its folly to think servers can't gain from power management. Most servers are idle, or running maybe 40%, might as well let those other cores sit idle if they aren't used. Example is at idle with power management our latest xeon draws 300W versus 390 without. 900W at full tilt and all power management disabled. The excuse that windows is a "general purpose" OS doesn't fly in my boat. Granted I don't use…

See especially people who used to have performance problems realising that the server was running a screensaver.

Terminal Server running serverside, not clientside, screensaver is poor for performance (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!search/windows$20...)

Q: My server has poor performance. (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!search/windows$20...)

I genuinely don't understand the Google groups interface. So I might not have linked to the correct messages. Some scrolling might be needed.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#157

Post by macspoofing »

drewcrawford wrote: post #149
gnaffle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true, but doesn't the whole "vertical integration" argument get thrown out the window when he describes the problem on Microsofts own hardware, the Surface Pro? Certainly Microsoft should have the ability or money to optimize those drivers for maximum battery efficiency.

Quite simply, no. Performance optimizations are all about trade-offs, and what might be a good trade-off for Microsoft's own hardware could be a bad trade-off for 95% of the other hardware on the market. In theory, Microsoft could ship a second set of bits for their own hardware. But now you start to have nightmares about the antitrust lawsuits in the 90s. Why is Microsoft keeping a secret faster Windows that only it…

>Performance optimizations are all about trade-offs, and what might be a good trade-off for Microsoft's own hardware could be a bad trade-off for 95% of the other hardware on the market.

Why not have an "Extended-Battery profile" that you can turn on and off, that will have Windows be more aggressive with respect to power conservation? It'll be toggled on automatically on Surface-type devices, and turned off for desktops and servers (though servers may also benefit).

So give me a break. Where there's a will there's a way.

>The only way for Microsoft to achieve the kind of vertical integration that Apple has would be if it was willing to destroy its existing OEM partnerships.

Hyperbole much?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#158

Post by bentcorner »

gnaffle wrote: post #116
blinkingled wrote: post #93

Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. The drivers too. Microsoft doesn't write their own drivers and then there's firmware too. It's the one area where Apple has really taken advantage of the vertical integration - they do everything from firmware to most apps people use. But both Windo…

That might be true, but doesn't the whole "vertical integration" argument get thrown out the window when he describes the problem on Microsofts own hardware, the Surface Pro? Certainly Microsoft should have the ability or money to optimize those drivers for maximum battery efficiency.

Google's Nexus 4 is a useful example here. It's in pretty much the same position as the Surface, and it also suffers from low battery life.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#159

Post by korg250 »

ohwp wrote: post #65

In the Windows prompt (admin mode) you can use the following command to monitor (it will generate a HTML file) energy usage (for 60 seconds): powercfg –ENERGY I can see some problems on my own system. For example "USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Suspend" Maybe misconfigurations like these are also causing more power consumption than needed.

The correct syntax is:

powercfg /ENERGY

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#160

Post by nbevans »

devx wrote: post #52
JonnieCache wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I disagree. WP7 would've been a much better and more efficient OS for tablets, and they already built that, but in the name of keeping OS licenses for tablets at ~$100 like for notebooks, and some kind of "unification strategy" (which still hasn't been realized yet), they've also made Windows RT for tablets and WP8 out of the NT kernel for phones. But even WP8 would've be better than Windows 8 or Windows RT (which is…

To the contrary, Microsoft, Nokia and partners are actively looking at bringing WP8 tablets to the market. Thus completely sidestepping the Windows RT issue.
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