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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#221

Post by Zaytes »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #142
VLM wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People spend money to conform for mating rituals or to gain power. You don't conform for mating rituals by purchasing some weird thing that no one else wants. (non-engineering defined) Power comes out of what you can do with something, not meaningless specification numbers (however awful they are for the surface pro 2). So to do something powerful on a surface pro 2, you go to itunes app store for that cool new app a…

HN must have not sprayed for evopsych in a while.

This comment isn't helping, but I can't resist - HN is inevitably devolving into /r/technology...

Kind of sad.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#222

Post by JVIDEL »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #184
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…

No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does it this has a low battery life.

It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS. Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a computer today.

And for what? I got several winxp apps that don't work with 7 or 8, it's pointless.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#223

Post by mwfunk »

It would really interesting to see the same battery life charts normalized for the display's power draw. I could be totally wrong here but my understanding is that that's an extremely significant factor in a lot of "casual usage" battery life benchmarks. If you take the display into account, then you can start to see how relatively efficient different OS' power management code really is.

Of course, if what you care about is the efficiency of the PM software, looking at total battery life probably isn't the most meaningful factor either, as they all have different-sized batteries, so what's important is power drain as a function of time.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#224

Post by pearjuice »

The shortest human read- and understandable answer to this poorly written bait article is: Mac OS is designed to run on only x, y and z hardware configurations whilst Windows is designed to run on the complete alphabet (a to z) of hardware configurations. This allows the developers of the former to have total control of the hardware and build specific workarounds, instructions and such as they know it will only run on that hardware. Windows, however, can be licensed to any hardware manufacturer. "It just works" (kinda) but that comes at the price of poor battery performance (and other things) as it isn't (and can't) be optimized as well as Mac OS.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#225

Post by at-fates-hands »

This is interesting to me since I have a Lenova Windows 8 tablet and it the battery life is pretty impressive. If I use it consistently, I can easily get 10-12 hours out of it.

I'm wondering what the difference is between the hardware the Surface uses and other Windows 8 tablets.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#226

Post by vetinari »

wvenable wrote: post #214
rubinelli wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Windows RT as close as it gets to a OS from scratch nowadays? (honest question)

Nope. Windows RT is ARM compiled Windows 8 with a little flag that prevents the installation of 3rd party desktop apps. It's not even a little bit different.

Technically speaking, the little flag does not prevent installation of third-party desktop apps. It prevents executing executables not signed by Microsoft. It is just a policy, that Microsoft will not sign classic win32 executables.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#227

Post by Samuel_Michon »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #184
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…

> 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.

I’m not sure whether that’s a fitting analogy. The Mac clone program was launched for other companies to build cheap computers with low margins, so that Apple could continue serving the higher end markets while MacOS would gain marketshare. Instead, clone makers ended up building very high end machines that were faster than anything Apple offered. They hurt Apple’s brand because they were so much faster, not because they were cheap trash.

Daystar Digital’s Genesis had 4 processors, PPC 604e @233Mhz. It had 12 RAM slots and 6 PCI slots. It was a monster and it creamed Apple’s PowerMac 9600, but it was also considerably more expensive.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#228

Post by Sheepshow »

blinkingled wrote: post #198
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…

> Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? Not only servers but they need the same kernel design to work well across a ton of different hardware/firmware combinations, form factors (Phone, Tablets, Laptops) and they do an OK job. But to excel they need to put in a lot more effort (working with OEMs, working with SoC makers is ano…

Funny, the Linux kernel performs excellently on my $35, 800MHz, 400mA ARM RaspberryPi embedded machine, my x86 desktop, and some of the world's largest supercomputers with who knows what architecture.

For a company with hundreds of millions to spend on R&D, you'd think Microsoft could match a bunch of hobbyists.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#229

Post by mitchty »

kbenson wrote: post #208
mitchty wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the fact you felt the need to put the word servers in quotes does a lot to show that you and justincormack are talking about computers serving a similar role, but with such laughably different requirements that it's obvious what point he was trying to make, and your statement, while technically correct, doesn't really change his point. You are correct though, people do use commodity and low-end hardware for e…

I put servers in quotes to denote something that serves that wasn't purpose built for the role. Nothing more, the context from justincormack wasn't lost but there are a lot of uses for osx servers, for example compile farms.

What I was referring to, which I thought was apparent but failed to convey, is that this perception of nobody doing it is a fallacy.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#230

Post by thrownaway2424 »

mwfunk wrote: post #223

It would really interesting to see the same battery life charts normalized for the display's power draw. I could be totally wrong here but my understanding is that that's an extremely significant factor in a lot of "casual usage" battery life benchmarks. If you take the display into account, then you can start to see how relatively efficient different OS' power management code really is. Of course, if what you care a…

These measurements are both from Anandtech, which a while back absorbed this obvious lesson and started testing at a standard 200 nits, instead of "50%" brightness like a lot of clueless review sites use (including Ars Technica, sigh).
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