Vista Draining Notebook Battery Life
 

According to many industry experts Windows Vista drains notebook battery life faster than Windows XP. The main culprit is said to be the new Aero Glass feature which may look nice but is a burden for many users on the go. While the Aero interface is disabled when switched to power-saving mode, many manufacturers like Hewlett Packard are seeking their own solution to this problem. Experts say that Microsoft will likely have to improve Vista battery life performance in the upcoming service packs to meet consumer pressure.

Source: ZDNet

probably because aero uses the graphics system heavily?

I'm surprised that people are surprised.

Yeah, who would have thought that something that requires more processing power would actually require more battery power :p.

lol i know! i tried to add a bit of sarcasm into it by stating 'according to industry experts' lmao!

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...e/Icons/50.gif

It is truly amazing that people are surprised about any flaw actually being a problem.
But wait for the snappy come back of "they will fix it in a patch/SP" :shadedshu :wtf: :laugh:

Yeah, I tried both RC2 and RTM x86 on my laptop. I was able to get about the same battery life running Home Basic and RMClock as XP, but what that implied is that on batteries, I was allowing my max mulitplier to only let the clock speed reach 1GHZ on a 1.7GHZ Pentium M. Needless to say, Vista (even Home Basic) runs pretty terribly at 1GHZ, with 1280MB RAM mind you.

So, to get decent performance on batteries with Vista, you have to let it run the clock speed up (XP x86 runs just fine on my laptop at 800MHZ). Doing that implies a loss in battery life. I suppose that this effect is further shown when you are really using the GPU heavily with Aero.

one positive from Vista (aka millenium no.2) is Hardware developers are being forced to make real performance boosts to keep up with the software, no doubt had vista not been released performance increases would have maintained that 5-10% average increment in performance.

Vistas just not ready for laptops i dont think, they should have released a mobile version of the OS, rather than the bazillion desktop versions.