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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#171

Post by mitchty »

justincormack wrote: post #164
__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.

No one uses Darwin for servers, not even Apple.

No one except a fair amount of people: http://www.macminicolo.net/

You can turn old laptops into "servers", or raspberry pi's, or hell even a commodore 64 for that matter. As long as it serves something of value over a network it qualifies.

Whether its a good idea is another matter.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#172

Post by herge »

jrajav wrote: post #165
macspoofing wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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? It's more the drivers than the kernel. Apple has a lot more control over OS X drivers.

Microsoft picks all the hardware, and corresponding drivers, that goes into the surface.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#173

Post by film42 »

mamp wrote: post #169
mojuba wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just disabled iCloud on my iMac, many things got faster, such as the Preview app. Previously it could take 3 to 5 seconds to load a trivial png image, now it's less than a second. But unfortunately I'm a bit dependent on the iCloud already...

The biggest background drain on my MacBook Air is DropBox. It keeps trying to make a network connection when there is no wi fi available. Pause syncing on DropBox and the battery life improves.

And then as soon as there is, slam an entire core for about 30sec to calculate diffs. [MBP Quad i7, 16GB, 500GB SSD].

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#174

Post by drewcrawford »

macspoofing wrote: post #157
drewcrawford wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 desk…

I already told you why not. Because anything that gives the Surface an advantage has that antitrust lawsuit smell.

> Hyperbole much?

Again, no. Any move to give preferential treatment to MS's own hardware is the push the OEMs need to convert their Windows Tablet initiative into an Android Tablet one. Not to mention having potential ripple effects in unrelated businesses lines like spooking HP into doing more Linux servers.

For better or for worse, Microsoft's most valuable asset is its OEM partnerships. It's not as cool a trick as it used to be, but it's the only card they have to play.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#176

Post by hahainternet »

ekianjo wrote: post #61
hahainternet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because it is Linux. The correct solution is to refer to a particular distribution, as many of them make significantly different decisions.

Android is not just linux. Linux is just the kernel, and everything else running on it has nothing to do with Linux and that's the majority of Android user software and interface. It's just like saying "this human and this bacteria are the same, they have a DNA with the same chemical structure !".

My point was not 'call all distributions Linux'. I'm saying that disqualifying Android but keeping Debian is incorrect. Debian, Android, Ubuntu. They are just different Linux distributions.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#177

Post by aroch »

fetbaffe wrote: post #136
[deleted] wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Windows UAC is the best I have used on any platform. What I can remember it was not that good on OSX. Not even Ubuntu gets this right. However the permission system on Windows is a hassle. I always have a normal user account and an seperate admin account. The normal account does not have sudo permission. This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assume…

>This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assumes normal user has some sort of sudo.

On OSX you get an elevated privileges login prompt for any installer needing to write to / and even for many write protected folders inside your own homedir. You can grant rights as any user you want simply by entering that username (it's automatically populated with the current user)

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#178

Post by shubb »

Surely a lot of this comes down to the screen?

Battery life varies greatly between e.g. Google Chromebook systems, running the same software (and between windows systems for that matter).

Some of this is to do with the power usage of the CPU, and whether video decoding is done in low power hardware, or which wireless chipset is used. But just looking at the power usage manager on your Android phone will tell you that the screen uses most of the power.

Windows hardware varies from high priced ultra books (where all is sacrificed for shininess and performance), to bargain bin systems where using an old backlighting technology saves a few bucks.

Question to Apple users - comparing windows laptops to your mac, which shipped with the more aggressive power saving settings in terms of turning the screen off when not in use?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#179

Post by 3825 »

macspoofing wrote: post #157
drewcrawford wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 desk…

(I can't reply to your child comment so replying here.)

>Any move to give preferential treatment to MS's own hardware is the push the OEMs need to convert their Windows Tablet initiative into an Android Tablet one.

I hope Microsoft's OEM partners don't think this way for the sake of progress. It is a scary thought that MSFT/Google would not optimize their reference hardware for the sake of pleasing OEM partners. I have a Nexus 4 phone. I certainly hope when they write an update for mako, they optimize it for mako.

It doesn't mean OEM partners can't use similar optimization. However, to my naive mind it is absurd to cripple reference hardware for the sake of pleasing OEM partners.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#180

Post by ohwp »

korg250 wrote: post #159
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

Both work.

  powercfg /?
shows -ENERGY
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