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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#181

Post by macspoofing »

drewcrawford wrote: post #174
macspoofing wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 se…

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

Who says it needs to be Surface only? Who says it needs to be limited to Microsoft hardware?

If the changes need to be in the driver or hardware layer, all Microsoft needs to do is release specs and then setup a certifying service for OEMs. Something like "Battery Optimized" cert that the partner can then communicate to the end-user. However, I have a feeling that lots of improvements can be done at the OS level to boost battery life before you start thinking about changing your driver model.

Bottom line this can be done. Windows tablets can and should be able to match Apple hardware in battery life and I have no clue why you're arguing they can't.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#182

Post by aroch »

film42 wrote: post #173
mamp wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].

If it makes you feel better, Dropbox does the same thing across a few cores on my Xeon E5 under Mavericks.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#183

Post by programminggeek »

When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result.

This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going to be the best Windows experience. At least, I would hope so.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#184

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

programminggeek wrote: post #183

When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result. This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going…

Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware because 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.

The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made. I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I can still install Linux on it.

Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#185

Post by brudgers »

macspoofing wrote: post #155
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…

Suppose Microsoft rewrites Windows to optimize for the Surface platform. How long would it take for Microsoft to stand accused of unfair business practices in the press? How much risk would they run of being hauled into court in the EU or US?

They just paid a billion dollars for failing to provide browser options in the EU last year.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#186

Post by revelation »

dingaling wrote: post #72
mjg59 wrote: post #45

Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components and Windows doesn't know how to call them.

I doubt very much that the commodity hardware in Apple laptops exposes any ACPI methods of which other operating systems are unaware. They are the same components as widely used, just packaged differently ( as lspci from Linux on an Apple machine will show ). From memory the only Apple-branded components were the SD card readers and the keyboard. And how would Intel / Nvidia / Broadcom / Samsung / LG / whomever be pe…

Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller

So maybe not ACPI, but homebrew.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#187

Post by blinkingled »

wbond wrote: post #118
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…

I would presume with the Surface Pro Microsoft would be involved in, or at least work with hardware manufacturers to write the drivers. The integration is the same as Apple has on OS X. Microsoft is involved with the hardware, the OS and the app (IE), right?

Sort of but not quite. Tegra 4 that goes in the new Surface 2 - The AnandTech review states the power draw for Tegra 4 is not that impressive for example. So Microsoft would have to be involved in the design and manufacture of the SoC to cure that problem as just one example of how hard it can be.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#188

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

_wmd wrote: post #88

While the core subject seems fair enough, I'd expect Atwood not to be so utterly stupid by trying to swap out Apple OS X running on one of a highly restricted variety of Apple Mac hardware with a generic Windows install and expect the result to be competitive. That's boxes-with-arrows mentality at its worst right there. In any 5 year period, Apple has a tiny list of exact hardware configurations OS X is designed to r…

Hackintoshes have been benchmarked by the community and by and large they hold up quite poorly when it comes to battery life. It seems to be a larger issue with power management in general when the hardware is so generalized.

That being said, there is no reason Microsoft's own drivers shouldn't work as good if not better on the Surface. The power management on these devices should be the benchmark for other companies to attempt to live up to.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#189

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

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.

Since we haven't figured out free-energy yet, using less power on servers is just as important as on tablets - if not more, considering most servers sit idle.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#190

Post by codeflo »

chimeracoder wrote: post #97
chatman wrote: post #94

Wondering how GNU/Linux distros (e.g. Fedora) stacks up against Windows 8 and OS X in terms of battery life.

On hardware for which high-quality drivers exist, GNU/Linux has the potential to outpace Windows and OS X[0] by a decent margin. The OS and kernel themselves are very power-efficient. You're not going to double your battery life or anything, but you might get a noticeable amount more. It depends a lot on what software you're running and whether you're taking advantage of any power-saving features that GNU and Linux p…

To put that more bluntly, Linux battery life entirely depends on the quality(1) of the Linux kernel modules for your hardware, and those vary wildly.

Yes, what Linux does in software is a lot better tuned in many places than the equivalent parts of OS X or Windows (in case of filesystem performance, sometimes frighteningly so). None of that matters when some component in your system doesn't properly enter its sleep states, because that component will suck your battery empty.

On the flip side, if you research Linux hardware support before buying your laptop, you should get very good results.

(1) Edit: I don't mean poor quality of implementation, just incomplete functionality. There's little the module maintainers can do about poorly documented hardware.

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