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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#91

Post by VLM »

bosie wrote: post #37
VLM wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The charts are quite ridiculous in the article - comparing an Ivy Bridge, actively cooled laptop-tablet to a Nexus 7? Why?" The relevant comparison was the surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet), has a 42 Wh battery and runs a mere 6.6 hours, but the macbook 11 inch has a smaller 38 Wh battery yet runs longer at 11.1 hours very nearly twice as long.

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

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 and ... whoops I mean play.google.com and ... whoops I mean I hope you never leave the tiny walled garden of the shovelware it ships with, because no 3rd parties are going to pay any attention to it and it'll be forgotten about in a year at most. Its got the expandability of a fisher price toy tablet.

So if you're trying to impress/intimidate/mate (all three?), its about as useful as wearing a Darth Vader costume other than on Halloween, if you're trying to collect meaningless specs its one of the worst in class for battery life, if you're trying to actually do something you need a real supported tablet like an apple or google tablet. So other than that, its a great... paperweight?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#92

Post by menubar »

da_n wrote: post #16

Anecdotal, but on an older 11" MacBook Air I have a dual-boot with elementary OS (Ubuntu derivative) and I get around 20-30% better battery life with Linux than OS X (using laptop-mode-tools etc). I think this is probably due to all the iCloud crap going on with OS X these days, but I have no proof of that.

Check TimeMachine also (if you're running it). It's a beast.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#93

Post by blinkingled »

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 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.

Edit: Fun fact: Apple's own Boot Camp drivers disable USB selective suspend on the 2013 Air! Check our powercfg /energy for more fun :)

Edit 2: Surface is Tegra 4 SoC isn't it? Microsoft still is limited by Tegra's power characteristics as far as what I can tell from Anand's review. So the integration story is better but still no match to Apple.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#95

Post by nbevans »

optymizer wrote: post #30

Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.

I would argue that the Windows NT kernel is both newer and more maintainable for Microsoft than OSX is for Apple. At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch.

This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC, TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing etc. These are all things that OSX took years to get after Windows got them.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#96

Post by __david__ »

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…

Perhaps you missed the part about Mac OS X (also a general purpose OS) using significantly less battery than windows on the exact same hardware. And that's not even considering OS 10.9 which is due to be released soon which has a bunch of battery life improvements (rumored to be around a 10% to 15% increase).

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#97

Post by chimeracoder »

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 provide.

However, unless you've chosen your hardware carefully, GNU/Linux will give you slightly worse battery life, because the drivers may be less efficient than whatever the manufacturer's native (Windows) drivers are. Again, the difference is significant statistically but not practically.

[0] The latter is a bit trickier to compare precisely, because OS X is designed specifically for very closed-source hardware for which no decent Linux drivers exist.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#98

Post by Touche »

SEMW wrote: post #67
Touche wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick Google search shows many Windows laptops with equivalent or better battery life. Is your question why don't all Windows laptops have equal battery life?

> A quick Google search shows many Windows laptops with equivalent or better battery life. I don't want to state the obvious, but different laptops have different capacity batteries. Atwood was comparing the 11" MBA to the Surface Pro 2 as they have similar battery capacities (SP2: 42 Wh, MBA: 38 Wh), and - as Maakuth notes -- are both made by companies in control of both software and hardware. The fact that you can…

Yes, of course, Windows can be comparable on similar capacities. Does this need to be stated? Go read the reviews of some Acer or Samsung laptops. Extrapolating the problems of the Surface 2 to all computers with the same OS doesn't make sense. Microsoft isn't experienced at making computers, shouldn't be a surprise that they are bad at it right now.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#99

Post by da_n »

The_Double wrote: post #33
da_n wrote: post #16

Anecdotal, but on an older 11" MacBook Air I have a dual-boot with elementary OS (Ubuntu derivative) and I get around 20-30% better battery life with Linux than OS X (using laptop-mode-tools etc). I think this is probably due to all the iCloud crap going on with OS X these days, but I have no proof of that.

Anectotical counter point: I have a old netbook that I've had running win7 starter, win7 ultimate running from the old SSD i had in my desktop, and a bunch of linux distros. So far, the win7 ultimate configured for a desktop pc has been the most energy efficient.

That's probably true if they are running older versions of the kernel, which were not optimised for battery. If you install a recent kernel and load laptop-mode-tools I'm sure you might see different results, if not that is a strange result for sure.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#100

Post by paol »

__david__ wrote: post #96
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…

Perhaps you missed the part about Mac OS X (also a general purpose OS) using significantly less battery than windows on the exact same hardware. And that's not even considering OS 10.9 which is due to be released soon which has a bunch of battery life improvements (rumored to be around a 10% to 15% increase).

There's nothing general purpose about Mac OS X as far as hardware support is concerned. Just like iOS, it only has to target a very small set of hardware configurations.

Edit: as pointed out elsewhere, this doesn't excuse MS from not taking advantage of the same vertical integration on their own hardware...

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