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)
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think age has much to do with it. Linux is older than Windows. Remember the current incarnation of Windows is derived from NT, a completely separate set of code from regular Windows originally released in 1993, with Linux originally being released in 1991. Linux wasn't even intended to be a production OS either, it was originally written as a i386 learning experiment.
Yet Android, which runs on Linux, manages to do much better in battery life.
expanding... (Score:5, Informative)
(1) there is so much cruft under the surface in Windows (fake DOS calls, umpteen levels of virtualism, etc) that the machine expends a ton of cycles doing what is NOP in newer systems not supporting 1980 calls.
(2) optimization isn't pretty and doesn't sell, so Microsoft is not cleaning house.
Re: (Score:3)
I mean, that's the only possible explanation for the way that the explorer.exe file manager sucks compared to any of a dozen third party replacements and still hangs when you access some resources. (Having a small portion of your user interface become unresponsive when there's a problem rea
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually Microsoft does not do that so much anymore. Windows 8.1 has pretty much exactly same system requirements than Windows 7 (which in turns runs smoothly on many later XP-era machines). Also Visual Studio (which still is a bloated pig) has been actually getting faster over 2010...2012...2013. Same with the Office suite, Internet Explorer, and what else.
I'm not saying that there isn't still a lot of legacy junk slowing down Windows, but this compared to the 90s when each version of Windows and other MS
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: (Score:3)
Microsoft is only organization who can answer that question. No amount of beating on it or guessing is going to provide the answer. There's no point in asking that question to anyone except the engineers building the software, that was my point.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft is only organization who can answer that question. No amount of beating on it or guessing is going to provide the answer. There's no point in asking that question to anyone except the engineers building the software, that was my point.
Oh, come on, none of this is secret.
Every DLL loaded and running in a Windows machine has a purpose, and you can google it to find out what it is.
There is no magic here, and even though the code is not opensource, its fully known what just about every part
of windows is doing.
On the other hand, look at all the running and "sleeping" processes in your Android phone. Some, that are part of
Android itself you can actually figure out what they are by reading the code. Others are inserted by manufacturers and ca
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Funny)
Just look at the source code, comment out what you don't like and compile.
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, Insightful)
So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but they're doing *neat* things that we like them to be doing.
Windows is just doing ... "things" ....
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.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Informative)
So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?
Sure they do things in the background, they just do it more efficiently than Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: Easy one... (Score:3)
Yeah. Windows has timer coalescing too. But apps have to be explicitly marked as supporting it - for back compat.
Re: (Score:3)
So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?
Sure they are. You can even look at the source for Linux to eventually figure out exactly what it's doing. You can't do that with Windows, hence my point that there is no reason to ask the question to anyone except the engineers building Windows. Only they can tell you exactly what Windows is doing in the background.
Re: (Score:3)
You would be surprised. I heard an excellent talk back in the mid-90's by a DEC engineer, one of the Alpha architects, about how they had instrumented Windows NT to do some performance analysis. Even though DEC was working very closely with MS they did not have access to the source code. They developed instrumentation that didn't require the source and they had this great analysis of how locking was working inside the Windows NT kernel.
One of the issues they found (at that time) was that Windows did not
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: (Score:3)
Do I CARE if the problem is hardware or software. I was forced to buy Windows installed on my computer by the company. In that case it should be the BEST it can be, right?
the answer is that program hangs like this STILL HAPPEN after a Decade of XP??? we don't care WHY it happens... we just know that Apple has done whatever work is needed to make it NOT HAPPEN 1/10 as often as on Windows.
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: (Score:3)
And linux doesn't offer anywhere near the same user experience as either Windows or OS X. .
And we thank God for that.
Re: (Score:3)
Linux is not a user experience or UI. It manages all your drivers and resources. You must be talking about a userland graphical environment? You can actually run linux with nothing but a text commandline or with triple monitors, it's up to you. Android is not any more stripped down than what i have running here. You compile the kernel for your machine, it is very slim. If you want to use the "everything and the kitchen sink" builds then they aren't very big either. Everything is loaded as a plugable
Re: (Score:3)
The Windows OS is built to work with a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
It runs on TWO architectures, and requires CONSIDERABLY more minimun hardware than Linux/BSD. How is that an excuse?
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'.
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: (Score:3)
BSD, on the other hand, was built with embedded systems in mind.
BSD was built before there was any thought about building embedded system with Unix. iOS, and OS X before it, have been pretty battery-conscious, but BSD, not so much.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
No, it wasn't. If we go back to 3 and 4BSD, it was built with VAXes in mind; even if we only go back to {Free,Net}BSD (Open and DragonFly forked off from them), it was built with PeeCee's in mind.
And NeXTStEP/OS X were also originally designed for desktops.
Desktop Linux, I hear, is pretty rough on power too, but not as bad as Windows.
Linux was also originally built with PeeCee's in mind.
So Windows, OS X, Linux, and *BSD were all originally built with personal computers in mind; all the power-saving stuff largely came later, as 1) notebook computers became more popular, 2) some of those OSes were taken into lower-power embedded systems, and 3) some of those OSes were taken into smaller mobile computers.
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:Easy one... (Score:5, Funny)
You do what for a living? Wake up and go back to sleep?
Sounds like fun to me.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Slashdot is a fairly technical audience"
You must be new here.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Informative)
(1) For the same reason that IBM inserted a 3-second delay in their mainframe's response to user input. Make it instant and people will complain the moment it is not. Make it a 3+ second delay and people get used to waiting.
Been working on IBM mainframes for 30 years and I've never heard of this. Sounds like BS to me. We mostly get (and have got for all of those 30 years) sub-second end-to-end response for 95%+ of production CICS transactions, unless the entire LPAR is running short of cpu capacity.
Re:Easy one... (Score:5, Informative)
It really is a simple question.
I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power.
OK, Jeff and Anand, listen up: it's because Windows is doing things in the background.
What is it doing? Ask the engineers that built it. But there's no reason to ask stupid vague questions like that when the general answer is so obvious. Windows does a lot of things in the background, all the time. It sounds like that carried over to the mobile version. If you want to know exactly what it's doing in the background (for academic purposes, I assume, since that knowledge isn't very useful) then feel free to ask the people who designed and wrote the software instead of the general public.
The benchmark used by the Anand and Jeff is OS X [codinghorror.com], which is doing a lot better batterywise than Windows 8. Neither of these are mobile, and both of these have a lot of background processes.
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: (Score:3)
Yeah, but a whole lot of it will go to "generic host process for windows services", with no way to tell what each instance of that is doing.
Re:Easy one... (Score:4, Funny)
12:01:01: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:02: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:03: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:04: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:05: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:06: Check for Windows updates...
12:01:07: Check for Windows updates...
...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
But... but.... but.... Apple doesn't do anything but change the color of their product and sell it as new. Samsung and Google are the only innovators.
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, the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This happens because you don't have the correct Intel thermal profile driver installed. There won't be any unknown devices in Device Manager, but you still need to install it or you will see the behaviour you are getting in Windows.
Intel allowed manufacturers using C2D processors to customize the thermal profile of the CPU based on what their hardware was capable of. That's how very thin and light laptops were able to use high end CPUs without overheating, but limiting the amount they can ramp up CPU speeds
Re:Power management is HARD. (Score:5, Funny)
Math is hard.
Let's go shopping!
Simple (Score:2)
Found yer problem (Score:5, Funny)
Ah ha: "I just wish somebody could explain to me and Anand why Windows is so awful at managing idle power."
You make the mistake of thinking that just because the device isn't doing something at the user's direction, that it is idle. How do you think the NSA is getting all of their number crunching done while they shake the bugs out of their Utah data center?
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...
Re:Found yer problem (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Windows Phone has optimized the battery lifetime by analyzing typical usage patterns - by far the most power on iPhones and android phone is spent on running apps. By realizing this, and making sure that Windows Phone have on few, and rather bad, apps, battery lifetime on the phone goes sky high.
Its a full desktop OS... (Score:2)
...and android is tailored for power savings on mobile devices.
I have a surface pro, it doesn't have fantastic battery life but I can get a hell of a lot more number
crunching done on a charge than on an android tablet. Mind you I bought it for use as a mobile
photo/video editing tool, if all you need is a web browser then you don't need a full featured OS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It looks like some people missed the part near the end of the post where they explain how Windows power usage is abysmal even compared to the desktop version of OS X.
It looks like some people missed the part where no tablet runs OS X.
Stupid troll submission (Score:5, Informative)
Only on Apple hardware, which requires Apple drivers for power management, and surprise surprise, Apple sucks at Windows drivers (and always has). In one particular, the Windows power management drivers for my friend's MBP don't suppose variable fan speed control. It always runs full speed. No shit, that's going to waste battery life... On the flip side of the coin, though, Hackintoshes get worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware. This entire "article" is stupid; anybody who isn't blinded by fanboyism and has used the systems in question could tell you that.
Surface Pro [2] has worse battery life than an iPad or Android tablet for a simple and bloody obvious reason: Core i5 CPU. Not some power-sipping little ARM chip with passive cooling, but full laptop-grade 64-bit processor. Even completely leaving aside the obvious (to anybody who is not an idiot, which apparently excludes the submitter) differences between a desktop OS (Win8.x) and a mobile one (Android or iOS), there are very obvious reasons for the battery life difference.
How do you compare for phones? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The Nexus 4 can allegedly run both Android and Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone [ubuntu.com]. I have not tried it, and I don't think there's a dual-booting bootloader yet, but it sounds interesting.
I know they both use the same kernel (more or less), but the software ecosystem is probably quite different, including the power management.
Bloat, bloat, bloat (Score:3)
Much like Jay Leno, they've built up a LOT of legacy bloat over the decades.
Windows bad battery life? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Have you installed laptop mode and powertop?
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?
How about we compare apples to apples? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You're comparing a device which is nearly a year old, with a device that's not even released yet, and which is a significantly different spec and also has a fairly significant price difference.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Read down a little further, he compares an MBA and a Surface Pro 2 running anad's wifi web browsing benchmark. The hardware is very similar, but the MBA lasts about twice as long.
Re:The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life.. (Score:5, Informative)
Errm, what article are you reading? Because the one I see shows the Haswell-powered 13" MBA getting ~14 hours of battery life to the Surface Pro 2's ~7 hours of battery life. Sure, the 13" MBA has a bigger battery, but the 11" MBA has a smaller battery and still gets ~11 hours.
Your arguments about the Surface Pro 2 not really being microsoft hardware are not really meaningful, you could say the same about Apple's notebooks. They don't make the CPU, or the GPU, or the SSD controller, or the screen, or the display controller, etc.
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 th
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.
not a fair comparison (Score:2)
You say you are comparing on the same hardware, but there is no hardware in common for all the OSes you state. Sure, there is the option to run windows on a Mac that normally runs OSX, but that's hindered by 3rd party drivers, so it's not a fair comparison. Comparing windows to IOS that runs on a totally different processor architecture even, isn't close to a fair comparison. Comparing WindowsRT to IOS may run on the same architecture, but again, no identical hardware where both are optimized for.
I'm no w
It's that damn "idle" process! (Score:5, Funny)
Chewing up all your CPU. [pcmag.com]
(Yes, this post is a joke. It's an (in)famous old article from everyone's favorite tech writer -- who was, in fact, being serious.)
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: (Score:3)
Yup. OSX does all of those things too - and yet, running on the same hardware with the same battery as the MSFT guys, still gets better batty life. As you'd know if you (quaint, I know) RTFA.
Completely agree with you on the TV side though. That shit's terrible.
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.
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.
Sony Vaio Pro (Windows) vs. 2013 Macbook Air (Score:5, Informative)
Moreover, the Sony Vaio Pro has a higher-resolution screen than the MBA, which puts the Vaio at a disadvantage (because it drains the battery a little faster). So with highly-optimized Windows drivers, the battery life looks the same or even better for Windows.
The comparison to ARM is just stupid. Obviously battery life is better on ARM, at the cost of much lower performance. That's true for Windows and OS X both.
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?
mindset (Score:3)
Apple wrote ios for devices with batteries in mind from day one.
It is slowing getting close to OSX, but they have to be careful.
Microsoft chose the "one O/S everywhere" serving needs of desktop
and devices at the same time. This was a naive approach.
Really? (Score:3)
My Nexus 4 phone barely lasts my work day. My iPad needs to be charged every day. I can get a few days out of my Nexus 10 unless I even touch a game. About the only device that lasts the week is my iPod Touch, but then I use it mostly as my alarm clock.
I think this is a pretty universal problem. Batteries have not kept up to the demand of CPU performance required by our devices, period.
Of course with relevance to article. when the author realizes that Surface Pro is a laptop (i.e. PC ) and iPad is a device built from phone hardware maybe he might realize how stupid the question was.
It would be more relevant to compare Surface Pro to MacBooks and ask how Macbooks can last the day while Surface Pro won't last more then a few hours.
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: (Score:2)
Except, historically, Windows has generally given a better battery life on the same hardware than Linux. I guess Android's user space may be more efficient than the typical Linux install.
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: (Score:2)
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battery life was absolutely terrible for me w/ linux. measured in minutes not hours. windows was at least 150% better on the same system (which still wasn't great).
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: (Score:3)
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.
Linux didn't run on many laptops in '93... and for a long time even this milennium, Linux on laptops was painful because of partially functioning hardware (docking and screen mirroring/dual screens), poorly working suspend/resume and poor battery life. While Linux was great for workstations - and by far the best choice for servers - let's not paint too pretty a picture. Working well on laptops is a far more recent addition.
Re: (Score:3)
For a fair comparison, you should make sure to use power management software with Linux too. Jupiter used to be the top favourite, but I believe that's fallen out of use now. I hear TLP is good, but never used it. Both tools should do what the manufacturer's Windows tool was doing- mostly ramping down the processor when under light use.
Re: (Score:2)
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In that case you're blind.
Re: (Score:2)
Unoptimized drivers, most likely. Apple has the benefit of being able to tune pretty much everything. And I doubt they put too much effort into their Windows drivers.
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Ah, so Microsoft is running the unoptimized Apple drivers on the Surface tablets..
That explains everything!
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The fact that you can do two things at once doesn't mean that you have to do lost of pointless work all the time.
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Like spell checking.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Funny you should mention Symbian - my S^3 phones had the best battery life of any of my smartphones, regardless of platform, without having larger batteries than their iOS/Android/Windows Phone counterparts.
Re: (Score:3)
> Why do Windows 8 tablets running on an Intel i5 x86 CPU
Actually, the newer Intel CPUs are supposed to suck a lot less when it comes to power consumption. Atoms just suck in general. The fact that they don't draw any power is hardly anything to write home about.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good question considering the fact that I've never seen Firefox take up the entire CPU on any desktop platform. Quite often Windows will seem obviously bogged down and there aren't any performance metrics to account for it. Can't even point a finger at the competing web browser.
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.
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:Reduce (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Rubbish. The netbook I'm typing this on right now dual-boots Ubuntu (full Unity bloat version) and Windows 7 Starter. It gets (or used to get a year or so ago, when the battery was a little newer) 6.5 hours under Ubuntu, more like 4.5 under Windows.
Windows just isn't built to be light. It tries to do A LOT in the background to "improver your experience". Some of which might even work. But a lot of it will turn out to have been wasted effort ("Wow, you've indexed all the files in my Program Files folder, well done! If only I had any reason to access a single one of those files today..."). And in the meantime, you've managed to consume a full third of my battery...