Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life? 558
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror is trying to figure out why the battery life for devices running Windows is so much worse than similar (or identical) devices running other operating systems. For example, the Surface Pro 2 made great strides over the original Surface Pro, increasing web-browsing battery life by 42%, but it still lags far behind Android and iOS tablets. The deficit doesn't get any better when Windows is run on Apple hardware. Atwood says, 'Microsoft positions Windows 8 as an operating system that's great for tablets, which are designed for casual web browsing and light app use – but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition's desktop operating system in OS X – much less their tablet and phone operating system, iOS?' Anand Lal Shimpi is perplexed, too. Atwood is now reaching out to the community for answers: 'None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X. And that battery life gap is worse today – even when using Microsoft's own hardware, designed in Microsoft's labs, running Microsoft's latest operating system released this week. Microsoft can no longer hand wave this vast difference away based on vague references to "poorly optimized third party drivers." ... I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power.'"
Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is ridiculous! (Score:0, Insightful)
Why do Windows 8 tablets running on an Intel i5 x86 CPU have lower battery life than tablets running ARM processors with restricted multitasking? I wonder..
Seriously, Windows 8 tablets running on Intel Atom CPUs manage to meet or exceed battery life targets made by Apple's iPad. I think that's pretty fucking impressive myself.
But I forget, this is Slashdot.
Re: Historically inefficient OS is Inefficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.
Re:Found yer problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Well Windows Phone 7 seems to be great when it comes to power management.
Android is awful. (Suppose WP8 will be as bad as the rest).
You're right, my WP7 phone (a Lumia 900) lasts way longer than my Galaxy S3... Never mind that WP7 can't run any apps in the history of ever (most notably it cant run a microsoft account-capable version of Skype, a microsoft product) but hey the battery will be there when I NEED it...
The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life... (Score:5, Insightful)
The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life pretty much answers its own question.
Surface pro and surface pro 2 completely destroy everything else in the benchmark ratings. It means haswell doesn't manage lower power scenarios nearly as well as ARM, but Intel never has.
For a comparison to iOS they'd need to well, actually have on on their chart. I can certainly see the argument that Windows is worse at power management than other OS's on the same hardware - but without hard numbers in a chart that's a tough case to make, since you're comparing different review sites to each other. Comparing different hardware is missing out on a lot - for most computing needs they're benchmarking Haswell is massive overkill - which might just be it, it literally cannot slow itself down enough (with either MS or intel drivers being the culprit) to save even more power.
Or windows is doing background stuff that other OS's aren't. Whether those provide any value to justify reduced battery life or not is debatable, but the answer seems to be 'probably not'.
It still isn't 'microsofts hardware', it's hardware from some 3rd party vendor they soldered together in a case and put their own sticker on it. Yes, it's up to MS to try and ride the cases of Intel and whomever is supplying their displays and SSD's to find ways to save power, but it's ultimately up to the 3rd party guys (who also sell parts to the rest of us) to actually make the drivers for their hardware.
It's the Windows advantage at work (Score:2, Insightful)
Literally. Microsoft touts all the capabilities built into Windows as advantages. The software and services to do all that are integrated into Windows. They aren't easy to remove. And the more things you have running, the more work the box has to do (even when it's idle, those services are still working in the background) and the more power it consumes. Android, OTOH, doesn't have all those services integrated into the OS, and it's a lot easier to remove unneeded services when they're separate components that you can just take out of the startup scripts.
Virus Scanning (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we expect our windows devices to be real computers and load them up with full applications. Then, we expect them to sip juice like Android. Can't comment on the OSX. My netbook on linux is 5 years old and doesn't have much of a battery left.
Re:Reduce (Score:5, Insightful)
The author is a massive troll for comparing Surface Pro hardware (which runs a full blown i5 processor) with iOS and Android hardware (which is typically far lower power both in terms of wattage and processing).
He's also comparing it against a MacBook, which can have exactly the same i5 processor. See the part in TFS about how running Windows on Apple Hardware doesn't actually change the deficit?
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Depends on what you're doing. My laptop gets better life on Linux than it ever did in Windows, but all I do with it is surf the web. It doesn't require a lot of processing power, and Windows wastes a lot of clock cycles running stuff it doesn't need to accomplish the task.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a deliberately obtuse answer and you know it. OBVIOUSLY it's doing things in the background. You'd think with 10 years of people beating on it from every angle, someone would've figured out what all these magic things are. What are users getting for all this background processing?
And if our ability to understand what's going on in the background is so poor, how can we ever trust the OS to do what we want it to? (I know the answer for a lot of folks out there is, "we can't".) It's possible to get process listings and logs, and apparently none of these explain it. But maybe someone out there that used to work for Microsoft can answer the question--you think we'd have better luck actually asking Microsoft themselves what the answer is?
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Alas, you have managed to correctly but uselessly answer the question (in classic MS fashion). Apparently the other OSes get by without all that idle activity, so why not windows. Is it incapable of it or is MS just unwilling?
The question was 'why is Windows so awful at managing power", not 'in what way does Windows squander power'.
It *is* Apples to Apple as well as Oranges... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are lots of posts here claiming that they aren't using like to like comparisons. The point of the post isn't that an iPhone is getting better battery life than a MS Exchange Server, the point of the article is that in almost every scenario you can match up, Android/iOS/OS X comes out clearly ahead. And this is the case regardless of what hardware or type of hardware you're comparing. Put Windows on a MacBook and it's going to get lower battery life... a-ha, it's a driver issue, you say, ok, but spec out a similar PC notebook and it will have lower battery life than the MacBook.
In other words, Microsoft doesn't have a battery life on the Surface RT or any other product problem, Microsoft has a battery life problem. Why is that?
Re: Historically inefficient OS is Inefficient (Score:4, Insightful)
If a multi-hour Windows battery becomes a multi-minute battery in Linux, you have a serious problem that needs to be fixed. That is not normal system behaviour.
Install problems are rare these days with Linux, but they're not unheard of. I'd guess that you've got some sort of hardware driver issue if the battery is discharging as crazily as that.
My experience of battery life with Linux (mostly using full-fat, full-bloat Ubuntu) is that it has always as good or better than Windows, except on one laptop I once installed on which I had serious driver issues with, which first refused to charge the battery at all, and then (after I'd fixed that) was discharging within about an hour. Once I'd fixed it, though, it was back to normal. And one problem-filled laptop build out of many dozens isn't a bad record really.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because Windows isn't as good at doing things in the background. Unfortunately it isn't easy to explain, but the gist of it is that other systems wake up, run all the tasks that need to run and then go back to sleep. Windows just wakes up as and when it needs to, so there is more time wasted switching in and out of sleep and overall more time in the active state.
I do this stuff for a living, it's fun stuff.
Re: Apple power mgmt (Score:2, Insightful)
Since your experience isn't typical of running Windows on that laptop, so clearly something is wrong. I hate it when anecdotal posts like yours get modded up. Nothing against you personally but one guy having an non-typical experience due to some unresolved issue isn't very helpful or representative.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read the article... of course not. They didn't just compared it to Android and IOS, they also compared the desktop/laptop versions, i.e. to OSX, which does not run on ARM.
Re:Easy one... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Slashdot is a fairly technical audience"
You must be new here.
In the middle, a giant WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
"The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system."
FUCK YOU.
Sorry, reflex action from a decade and a half of dealing with the "most reliable aspect of any operating system" and the thing about windows that really drove me to OSX.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Windows OS is built to work with a very wide variety of hardware configurations. Just because the Surface devices come in one hardware profile doesn't mean Microsoft spent years fine-tuning the OS to take advantage of that hardware exclusively. Which is exactly what Apple does with OS X.
Sorry that is just complete bullshit. If you had read the article or at least the summary that would be clear to you.
Hardware has nothing to do with the fact that Windows is doing all the time some nonsense in the background. There where times on 4GHz notebooks where you could not watch a simple DVD because it would hang every 30 seconds for half a second. What the fuck has that to do with "windows has to cover multiple hardware combinations"?
The problem with windows is not only windows alone but also stupid virus scanners, hard drive encryption, search index update stuff etc.
Note: hardware interacts with the system very simple, there is no reason that a wide variety of hardware in any way slows down the "kernel"! Your opinion only shows you have no clue about programming or software or hardware or operation systems or all of that.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Windows OS is built to work with a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
Have you seen the list of hardware linux can run on? Windows ships with drivers, yes, but it depends on hardware manufacturers to ship their own drivers a lot of the time.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's generally way better on an embedded device to do 10 things and then sleep for 10 units of time, than to do one thing and sleep one unit of time 10 times, as the latter prevents deeper sleep states being entered in the hardware.
Well-written modern (last 4 years-ish) linux kernel drivers will try to use range timers, to hopefully permit a whole bunch of wakeups being scheduled together.