I was wondering about vista's power consumption. Does it use more power than xp?.....even after disabling aero?

If it does use more power, then does this mean that vista users are getting less performance per watt?

It does not use more power, even with Aero enabled. Well, maybe a few tenths of a Watt. In terms of performance per Watt, depends on the usage scenario. Most tasks are actually faster with Vista (assuming adequately provisioned system), but some are slower (most notably moving files).

I haven't seen or done any testing on this, but my intuition would be that it would use less. Especially if you have a lot of RAM (4GB+), Superfetch should reduce hard drive access, meaning lower average power consumption.

It would be nice to see the main OS's lined up and tested for power consumption. And also rated for greenness of packaging too.

saw couple tests at phoronix.com
granted they are outdated by now
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... =880&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... =878&num=1

Configured identically, you should not see much of a difference. However, Vista will do the drive indexing by default whereas XP won't (unless you install Windows Search), and I know my hard drives are working a lot more in Vista than in XP.

That is working on the assumption that the PC is on for sometime. If the PC is on for 5-minutes to check what the road congestion is like before you go to visit someone for the weekend, then XP will win hands down because its not thrashing the HDD for 5-minutes solid, it will load what it has to + your Web Browser.

The flip side to that is if you have your PC on all day in regular use, at which point Vista should end up winning/drawing.

Without an actual study we wont know for sure when Vista will break even with XP, but I guarantee you that on most PC's in existence made within the last 4-years XP will win. In a year or so the tables will be turned when the "average" hardware can cope with Vista + the mountains of crap software that people (and OEM's) install. This has happened with the transition between 95/98, 98/Me, Me/W2Kand W2K/XP.

I hope that MS have learned their lesson with the many Flaws of Vista and actually make "Windows 7" faster than the previous OS.

But to put all of this into perspective, the differences will be very small unless the PC is severely under powered.


Andy

I did an OS power consumption test about nine months ago.

Glad to see that Vista still doesnt win any badges, come on "Windows 7".


Andy

Why are you glad? I've been using Vista for 6 months now and I find it perfectly satisfactory. While it is not a huge improvement over XP, it is an improvement. I'd rate it like going from Win95 to Win98. Anyway, you'd be foolish to get Windows 7 right away. Microsoft (in the 20 years I've been using their products) has never released a product that wasn't vastly improved by a post release patch/upgrade. As the cliche goes, wait for SP1.

I have not tested Vista versus XP but I can confirm that Aero draws a couple of watts more when it is turned on. Can not remember exactly how much more, but it was no more than 5 watt.

With that said, I turned Aero off.