Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of my last experiences, it still does.
Ubuntu runs ~six hours on my 3 year old dell vostro that's rated for four hours on windows.
How long does it actually run on Windows?
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
311–320 of 329 posts
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#312The Sony VAIO Pro 13 seems to have a lower normalized power consumption in the same workload, per http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-pro-13-exceptionall...
Of course it has a much smaller battery due to it's low weight.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sony manage to get pretty amazing battery life from their new Vaio Pro 11 and 13 models. I am really tempted to get one as it does pretty much everything I want from a high powered laptop and the price is pretty good in my opinion.
Though they did that by adding an additional battery.
It seems quite close or even better when normalized per watt-hour, see http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-pro-13-exceptionall...
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#314I'm actually saddened by the fact that we consider 8 hours of battery life satisfactory, and 14 hours nothing short of astronomical . Anything less than a full day work for a mobile device should be unacceptable. Smartphones are particularly bad at it. If anyone remembers Palm devices, they could last for more than a week (!) on one charge. With my Nexus 4, even with light usage, I've come to a habit to plug it in wh…
So would you be happy with modern devices with Palm screens? I don't think anyone would. The screens are the power drains. The actual processing power has skyrocketed, and I consider the power available in a modern phone to be quite amazing.
I had a Palm 3e that took AA batteries if I recall correctly. True, the battery life was quite good but the volatile memory was not - you needed to replace the batteries within seconds of taking them out else you lost everything.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#315Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#316I 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?
Strangely enough, my Windows 8.1 managed to suspend everything yesterday. Not only the Metro apps that I didn't use, but also Explorer and every other desktop application I used. Wonder how that happened (although I used to suspend applications manually before if I wanted to pause them somehow, e.g. CPU- or I/O-intense long-running things).
Isn't that called "crashing"?
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strangely enough, my Windows 8.1 managed to suspend everything yesterday. Not only the Metro apps that I didn't use, but also Explorer and every other desktop application I used. Wonder how that happened (although I used to suspend applications manually before if I wanted to pause them somehow, e.g. CPU- or I/O-intense long-running things).
Isn't that called "crashing"?
I cannot undo a crash, but I can resume applications just fine. In that particular case I tried hibernate first which led nowhere, so essentially yes, it was akin to a crash. Still puzzling, as that never happened to me (and Windows versions prior to 8 didn't use the suspend/resume functionality anyway).
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#318It's always busy.
To look at what it is doing, download Procmon: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have numbers for your 100% true test. That is where the final 50% difference comes from. 2013 MacBook Air 13" Under OS X: 14hr 26 min Under Win8: 7 hrs 40 min Though I am not sure I would call that 100% fair. Apple wrote the firmware and drivers used by each OS, so it has a vested interest in getting something out there that works but not optimizing for the competition.
Your parent already said he did not consider running Windows on Apple hardware to be a fair test; he was calling for running both on
Yeah, but what are you going to see in the real world? You are going to see OS X on Apple hardware and Windows on whatever random box the person had handy. Sounds pretty much like what they tested.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#320There's a comment on the article that links to http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re... .
Which seems to point to many apps (embarrassingly mostly MS apps) setting the OS timer interval to something like 1ms (from a default of 15.6ms) and not resetting it.
Anyone with any experience with the Windows 8 timer care to weigh in on this issue? I'm well out of my depth when it comes to processor / kernel level power tuning.