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.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Questions (Score:5, Interesting)
A few questions that would be interesting to know the answers to:
- Is the power consumption deficiency the same across all hardware or does it close the gap on certain pieces of hardware?
- Is the consumption deficiency gap the same on tablets vs laptops vs PCs?
- How much can Windows 8 be tweaked to save battery life (IE: disabled unneeded services)?
- Does it manage power of certain pieces of hardware better than others (SSD vs HDD, AMD vs Intel)?
- Do drivers make a difference in power consumption?
- How many hamsters have heart attacks every time Windows 8 is benchmarked?
Because Windows. (Score:0, Interesting)
There is no other reason to it.
Windows is terrible at power management, terrible at memory management, terrible at idle processing, terrible at BEING idle, writes log files CONSTANTLY, does so much stupid shit in the background all the time, stuff you usually cannot disable even from administration programs in the OS that needs to be disabled from tweaking programs and the like, etc.
Windows is just filled with crap LITERALLY NO SINGLE PERSON WANTS but Microsoft.
Windows won't be good until they ditch Windows and rewrite it entirely.
Fuck developers, get with the times, most devs code is terrible and ancient as it is, usually with a few tweaks to make it work on Win Vis7a onwards. (RT can get wrecked though)
These are the devs that have flooded our registry with crap, that have flooded out documents with crap, that have flooded our program settings / data folders with nonsense and worse, destroyed the desktop of over a billion people.
They don't deserve a hand being held. They should be left to walk on the road alone. Hopefully they get hit.
I have no sympathy for developers with terrible code practices. There is "working code" and "production code", don't mix them!
RE: Apple power mgmt (Score:3, Interesting)
So much so, that when I fire up XP it goes into TURBOFAN MODE and CPU temps still climb into nutsack-roasting level. 90 to 100 C for the CPU temps (Core2 Duo) have occurred without too much heavy lifting. So forget about the battery life, there is no use without the power cord. It's more an issue to be concerned with the physical limits of the rest of the hardware, like when does it melt?
Not liking TFA or conclusions (Score:3, Interesting)
Comparing operating systems running different hardware is a meaningless endeavor.
Comparing on the same hardware is better until you take the logical leap of drawing general conclusions from it.
When you use the conclusions above to draw additional conclusions about what you think would happen your ability to predict or be taken seriously takes a hit.
My 5 year old lenovo draws ~7 watts on battery with the 14" display on and 7200 RPM platter spinning. I am able to observe consumption difference from battery manager in detail when I turn hardware on and off.. run applications..etc.
The answer is likely knowable if only there was willingness to spend more time (thinking), measuring and working the problem and less time (talking) drawing conclusions.
What an absurd headline (Score:5, Interesting)
Comparing a Surface Pro to an iPad is about as useful as comparing a bus to a small car. Of course the small car uses less fuel, but I'd like to see a bus full of people crammed into said car.
The iPad and the tablets that it inspired are the new netbooks: barely useful for anything beyond simple tasks.
The Surface Pro and similar tablets are ultabooks stuffed into tablets - this has advantages and disadvantages.
As for OS X, that is indeed somewhat misterious, but it probably boils down to:
- Driver optimizations: having a very limited set of hardware that needs to be supported makes it much easier to optimize drivers (and if needed the OS itself).
- Bloatware: my Ativ Smart PC Pro came with at least three Samsung applications that constantly run in the background and (way too often) interact with the user. Control panel thingies for this and that driver don't help, either. Some of those probably misbehave and screw up the scheduler enough to measurably reduce idle time. These are not present on OS X.
- UI: I'm not sure just how much hardware acceleration OS X uses, but Windows Vista/7 with Aero and Windows 8 at all times have hardware accelerated graphics for their UIs - eye candy in exchange for power consumption.
- Unusually low-power hardware: I can imagine Apple applying pressure for individual components' power consumption to be lowered - the screen comes to mind as a likely culprit.
The things windows does, as a real OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Defragging a potentially huge disk, in the background, on-the-fly, so the disk never slows down.
File search index, in the background, on-the-fly, so you can search faster. You can turn this off.
Full window dragging, and many other graphics enhancements. You can turn these off.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Port polling, did you know that a USB port might gett polled 50'000 times per second? You can turn this down. A lot.
Scheduled tasks. Oh so many scheduled tasks. You probably have over 1'000 defined.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
An actual software Firewall. You can turn it off, or make it much simpler.
Multi-user, multi-profile. Everything gets doubled.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
Event logging. Windows knows what it's doing, because it takes the time to write it down.
The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system. It's incredibly fast, always-on, used tens of thousands of times in a single moment by a any application -- my graphics suite writes 12'000 registry entries when I close the application. And you never need to worry about it getting corrupted.
No fewer than eight different scripting languages available at any moment.
Twenty versions of a single DLL loaded concurrently, for cross-decade application compatibility.
It's not just an operating system. It's a generic operating system that can run anything from decades ago. My 1985 application still runs on my vista machine, which is still running smoothly 7 years after I built it, and now it's running software 7 years newer than it is. iOS doesn't do that. Neither does OS X. Neither does Android.
But there's always been a version of windows with better battery life. It used to be called XP embedded. And it was exactly what you expected it to be -- you got to just start turning off huge parts of windows. You're welcome to do it. No, you don't want to. You don't want things to be slower, and you don't want to lose all of those great features. And many are tied together.
And that's why you chose a windows machine in the first place. Not because it does the bare minimum, and hence saves battery life, but because it does everything it's always done at a reasonable battery life.
But hey. If you want to complain about power vs features, I want you to look at my tvision's on-screen menu system. Now it's a smart tv, with a menu of icons to all sorts of dumb shit. And yet, just scrolling through those pages of icons is slower than my speak'n'spell. My tvision is plugged into the wall, with as much power as it wants. The led light bulb consumes more power than the computer running the on-screen menu. Why? I have no idea. But it also doesn't have a pre-amp, so I can't plug in any headphones or larger speakers without an optical cable and a home theatre amp/receiver. Thanks for that.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it wasn't designed with power management in mind. Duh. The engineers who wrote some of the subsystems probably took shortcuts that they knew would suck up power (indefinite loops or some such) but were easy to implement. It is a desktop OS.
BSD, on the other hand, was built with embedded systems in mind. So they optimized and managed the power consumption of their components wisely. Desktop Linux, I hear, is pretty rough on power too, but not as bad as Windows.
How can they fix this? Well, there are two options: 1) Dig deep and hope your fix doesn't break something. 2) Re-engineer from scratch. Note I didn't say "rewrite." Oftimes, power issues are built into the protocol, not on purpose, but the only way to implement the protocol without a lot of black magic is to suck up power. The protocols themselves probably would need to be redone, optimized.
Just a quick example of power management and the lack of thought around it: processing SGML generally requires more power than processing JSON. The difference is negligible for most use cases, but it adds up over many systems and over a long time. Binary formats are probably the best power-wise, but they're also the least interoperable.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot is a fairly technical audience. Some of the people here may actually know the answer to that question, so it's valid to ask it. You're also likely to get a better answer than you would from Microsoft, which is always some marketing-vetted non-answer bullshit.
Re:The things windows does, as a real OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Defragging a potentially huge disk, in the background, on-the-fly, so the disk never slows down.
Why on earth would it do this while on battery? Can't it wait until the machine is plugged in again?
File search index, in the background, on-the-fly, so you can search faster. You can turn this off.
Again, why do this by default when on battery?
Full window dragging, and many other graphics enhancements. You can turn these off.
This will have almost no impact on battery life unless you are spending most of your time dragging around windows for your own amusement.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Why? If I'm not trying to print anything, who cares if the printer is there.
Port polling, did you know that a USB port might gett polled 50'000 times per second? You can turn this down. A lot.
Why default to such an aggressive polls/second while on battery?
Scheduled tasks. Oh so many scheduled tasks. You probably have over 1'000 defined.
I certainly didn't schedule over 1000 tasks. Why are there over 1000 tasks scheduled and why are they scheduled to run while on battery?
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
Why? I'll know as soon as a webpage can't load.
An actual software Firewall. You can turn it off, or make it much simpler.
If this has any effect on battery life then it is horribly, horribly written.
Multi-user, multi-profile. Everything gets doubled.
You have multiple users logged into your laptop while on battery? Sure, it's possible but, I find it highly unlikely that most people do.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
See above.
Event logging. Windows knows what it's doing, because it takes the time to write it down.
That's the only potentially valid thing you've said so far. Well, the first sentence at least.
The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system. It's incredibly fast, always-on, used tens of thousands of times in a single moment by a any application -- my graphics suite writes 12'000 registry entries when I close the application. And you never need to worry about it getting corrupted.
At this point I'm wondering if this is actually a troll.
No fewer than eight different scripting languages available at any moment.
I don't see how this could affect battery life at all.
Twenty versions of a single DLL loaded concurrently, for cross-decade application compatibility.
Except for the disk access to read the DLLs, just having them in memory makes no difference at all.
What about a Hackintosh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have been interested to see what the gap looks like on a Hackintosh where, presumably, hardware optimizations would be in Windows' favor. I suspect the gap would remain, since the battery optimizations don't depend much on device drivers.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to do the experiment, so to get ready, I turned off all the background services that I didn't want running... and already almost no applications worked. So the real why is that MS doesn't write encapsulated code; rolls everything into the kernel; and so nearly everything is "required," even the stuff the user doesn't want to use and whose outputs will never be displayed to the user in any form. In most cases the app the user is trying to use isn't even asking for that background data, it is just that nothing is encapsulated.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine your the head of a major energy corporation and at a dinner party one night, you get to chatting with some software engineer who works on things that are used on computers all over the world.
It seems feasible that sooner or later you might talk about algorithm efficiency, and the guy ends up saying something like "yeah, I suppose if I did *that* instead, it would probably use more power."
So the energy company dude pays some engineer handsomly to toss is a little extra waste. That ineffcient algorithm is now silently generating $5million/year in *free* revenue.
Anecdotal Hackintosh Apples-Apples comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
From the comments on the main article, I read this link [1].
The kicker? This was from 2009, referencing 10.5.7, a four-year old OSX vs. Windows 7. I'd be interested to see if a recent netbook hackintosh with Mavericks vs. WIndows 8.1 would show... likely an even wider divergence given the findings in this /. post.
[1] http://www.mobilemag.com/2009/05/14/hackintosh-netbooks-experience-33-battery-life-boost/ [mobilemag.com]
Re:expanding... (Score:4, Interesting)
They are cleaning house. Windows 8 is more efficient than Windows 7 for example, in terms of memory usage. However, Microsoft is so far behind that it will take a very long time before they make decent headway on the cleanup.