Hard evidence battery life Vista vs XP?

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tehfire
Posts: 530
Joined: Mon Jan 01, 2007 9:57 am
Location: US

Hard evidence battery life Vista vs XP?

Post by tehfire » Sat Jan 26, 2008 5:57 pm

Hey everybody,
I just bought a Lenovo R61 ( :lol: ) and promptly am putting an extra 2GB (3GB total) of memory in it. My R61 comes with Windows XP preloaded, but my university has a nifty deal with Microsoft where I can get Vista Ultimate for only $10. I like Vista for the wow factor and that it will be the API for a few years to come, but I'm a little worried about battery life.

I've seen some reports every once in a while saying either that Vista is horrible in the battery consumption department, or that it's exactly the same as XP. Battery life is going to be really important to me as I'll be using this laptop unplugged quite often, so I was wondering: does anybody here have some real, first-hand experience as to how the battery life is affected by Vista as opposed to XP?

I did see somebody post something recently showing that their system basically used the same amount of energy with both XP and Vista, but I just wanted to hear a few nods or nays.

Thanks

jhhoffma
Posts: 2131
Joined: Mon Apr 25, 2005 10:00 am
Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Post by jhhoffma » Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:57 pm

Vista can be a little smarter with power options, but all else being equal OS type will not play an important role in power consumption.

The problem is that Vista takes away the "all else being equal". The Aero interface will use much more power (being 3D based) than the basic UI.

However, you will do more to save power usage by being smart with your laptop than by worrying about the OS. Go with Vista if you want the latest and greatest, it will use more memory (and run a little slower than XP) but looks great on an LCD. Turn off the advanced UI, turn down the LCD brightness and make sure that the HDD spins down when not in use and you'll have the best battery life you can manage without sacrificing too much.

jaganath
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Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:59 pm

The Aero interface will use much more power (being 3D based) than the basic UI.
Palindroman did a test recently which seemed to show that this was not the case; see link.

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