Vista consumes excessive amounts of power in 'sleep'

[zhenya]

I'm currently attempting to run Vista Business 32 on my z61t. One major problem is that I cannot get the Thinkpad Power Management software to install without crashing at startup. I have a thread about that issue here. Anyhow, I'm not sure whether that contributes, but I have a couple of issues with Vista, one - my battery life seems quite a bit worse than running XP. This is the opposite of what I'd expect. Two, when I put the computer to Sleep, it consumes a LOT of power. Asleep, unplugged, it will drain my 7-cell battery in 12-15 hours. I understand why, but this, again, seems even worse than XP on the same laptop.

Generally I prefer to hibernate to get around this issue, but going in to and resuming from hibernation is again, very slow. Last night I decided to enable Hybrid Sleep and experiment with that, although everything I have read about it insists that it is worthless for a laptop. Lo and behold, it slept quickly, it woke quickly, and it only used up >40% of my battery in 16 hours. I just don't understand WHY.

So, my questions -

1) Are other people generally getting better or worse battery life in Vista?
2) Is hibernate always this slow, or is something wrong?
3) Hybrid sleep - my understanding is that this sleeps (ie keeps your system state in RAM for quick resume) AND writes the image to the drive in case of a power outage. How on earth is this using less power than regular sleep then?

[Marin85]

1. Vista tends to perform more disk I/O, hence is has worse overall battery life than XP.
2. You don´t mention how slow your hibernation is, but I would agree it´s slow IMO too.
3. Hybrid sleep is actually not meant as a power saving option for notebooks. It´s meant as "safe" sleep for desktops/workstations since not every desktop has backup power (to prevent data loss). Additionally, in Vista, if the laptop is approaching very low battery state, it resumes from sleep and hibernates automatically to prevent data loss.

Cheers,

Marin

[i-SnipeZ]

Also Aero will absolutely hurt your battery life. It takes excessive ammounts of ram and gpu power, so much so that Vista disables it when you start up a game or I believe any full screen app.

[Marin85]

It would be interesting though to find out what battery life Vista can offer with classic windows theme and indexing + superfetch/prefetch disabled (in comparison to XP).

[bill bolton]

Also Aero will absolutely hurt your battery life.

No.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[i-SnipeZ]

Well it may depend for different people, but I have noticed this personally on my T61 as well as my Macbook and Macbook Pro. Its not a huge ammount, but its enough that it can be an annoyance (20 minutes or so).