Battery life in XP vs. Vista

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Mack · #1 Post by **Mack** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 6:50 pm

Has someone done a comparison of battery life under XP vs. Vista with Aero Glass enabled? I am thinking of buying a ThinkPad X60s since it has great battery life. However, I am unsure how Vista will affect it. The Aero effects might stress the GPU and CPU harder. It might also affect if the fans need to be turned on more often or not.

It would be highly interesting if someone has done a comparison.

Regards / Mack

sugo · #2 Post by **sugo** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 8:37 pm

Aero Glass needs heavy 3D processing. On my T42, Vista + Aero isn't battery friendly at all.

makaveli559m · #3 Post by **makaveli559m** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 2:43 pm

I have a high capacity battery for my Thinkpad A20m. on XP could get at least 4 to 5 hrs of usage. When I tried Vista it only gave me 1.5 hrs or 2 at the most. That is a big difference not to mention that I dont have no gui support lol

taz42zero · #4 Post by **taz42zero** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 3:48 pm

i have a t41 with the 9 cell and got 3.5-4 hours with xp, and with vista i can only get about 2.5 as well, and thats without the aero and glass on. my battery is a bit older, so i don't the same life a new one would, but thats my comparison so far.

pianowizard · #5 Post by **pianowizard** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 5:36 pm

Now that's a big reason for NOT switching to Vista! Looks like I will stick to XP Pro until Microsoft comes up with a less power-hungry version of Vista.

WilsonF · #6 Post by **WilsonF** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 8:07 pm

You can turn Aero off and return to Windows basic or default or whatever it's called when you open an app that doesn't like Aero.

I suspect that's what every corporate IT dept is going to do with group policy.

It'll be interesting to see what Lenovo (who has a much bigger stake than any of us) does to extend battery life with Vista.

christopher_wolf · #7 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 8:39 pm

Depends on the power management drivers they finalize for the Thinkpads taht are to come with Vista. This isn't Vista final, so Microsoft is probably fiddling with the ACPI APIs a little. Although the Aero interface and other eye candy does suck up battery life in the form of the GPU+CPU cycles spent on rendering those parts of the GUI. Although that is a pretty serious drop off in battery life from Windows XP to Windows Vista, several hours?

kulivontot · #8 Post by **kulivontot** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 10:25 pm

I think it defaults to turning off some of the aero features when on battery anyway to save power. Or you definitely have the options to change that in whatever power scheme you select. Overall, I haven't noticed a sharp decrease in power management from xp to vista all that much. I think it depends on the hardware drivers though. I hear macbooks running vista get a solid 1.5 hours of battery life.

bigtiger · #9 Post by **bigtiger** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 11:54 pm

Intel has tried very hard to make energy friendly chips. Microsoft is doing sth on the contrary. That is interesting.

I will hold off too. Maybe until more I upgrade my hardware. For, X41 serves me well with XP.

arni · #10 Post by **arni** » Mon Nov 06, 2006 3:10 am

There was a discussion about the fact that vista sucks more battery than xp on the vista newsgroups.

The final statement from an MS guy was, that indeed there is more power consumption in actual builds like 5600 and 5744. But you have to remember that they are still in beta as most of the drivers are.

Despite of the fact that the gui is more dependent on gpu the overall power consuption would not affect the system so drastically when oems will push final drivers with better vista support.

As is of now i only noticed on my T60 a slightly decrease of battery time (maybe about half an hour). So thats not really an issue, since i'm only on the standard battery and battery life was not better in xp.

RUSH2112 · #11 Post by **RUSH2112** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 2:08 pm

kulivontot wrote:I hear macbooks running vista get a solid 1.5 hours of battery life.

Solid? I used to have one, and got a "solid" 4 hrs under OSX, and they advertised 6. 1.5 is despicable. Vista? No thanks.

dfumento · #12 Post by **dfumento** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:30 pm

Aero Graphics reduces battery life from say 3 hours with XP to 2hrs with Vista.

http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/11/07/ ... page5.html

makaveli559m · #13 Post by **makaveli559m** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 12:19 am

I would use Vista but I cant get my onboard networking to work it lol and serial port drivers. Anyone know how? I have an A20M Thinkpad.

eTools · #14 Post by **eTools** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 1:18 pm

I've heard from a friend that he get MORE life out of his battery in Vista than XP. Do you guys have any idea if this could be true or not? Battery life is a key factor for me in deciding whether or not to get Vista.

pianowizard · #15 Post by **pianowizard** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 1:28 pm

eTools wrote:I've heard from a friend that he get MORE life out of his battery in Vista than XP.

I find that hard to believe. Please ask your friend how s/he made the comparison. It's important to minimize the number of variables, e.g. you don't want the screen to be brighter in one case than in the other.

taz42zero · #16 Post by **taz42zero** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 2:10 pm

pianowizard wrote:I find that hard to believe. .....

i agree, everyone and every article states battery life is not as good in vista as with xp, i am one of those speaking from experience...

#17 Post by **tomh009** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:07 pm

eTools wrote:I've heard from a friend that he get MORE life out of his battery in Vista than XP. Do you guys have any idea if this could be true or not? Battery life is a key factor for me in deciding whether or not to get Vista.

Possibly ... but for sure only without running Aero.

taz42zero · #18 Post by **taz42zero** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:18 pm

tomh009 wrote:Possibly ... but for sure only without running Aero.

i don't run aero and noticed significantly less battery life....

#19 Post by **tomh009** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:26 pm

taz42zero wrote:
tomh009 wrote:Possibly ... but for sure only without running Aero.
i don't run aero and noticed significantly less battery life....

What power profile do you use? Do you run NHC and/or fan control?

pianowizard · #20 Post by **pianowizard** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:31 pm

tomh009 wrote:Possibly ... but for sure only without running Aero.

I don't see how Vista could possibly consume less battery power than XP. Even without Aero graphics, Vista gets the laptop to work a lot harder than XP to do similar things, simply because it's a much more complicated operating system (just look at the system requirements of 512MB/800MHz vs. 128MB/233MHz). How could that not reduce battery life?

taz42zero · #21 Post by **taz42zero** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:34 pm

when i am on ac, i'm on high performance. when i'm on battery though, i am on max battery since thats the only way for me to get decent life out of it. no fan control, nothing. i've compared with same screen brightness, same accessory (bluetooth and wireless) settings also.....

pianowizard · #22 Post by **pianowizard** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:38 pm

taz42zero wrote:when i'm on battery though, i am on max battery since thats the only way for me to get decent life out of it. no fan control, nothing. i've compared with same screen brightness, same accessory (bluetooth and wireless) settings also.....

Sounds pretty good. Did you also run similar programs and perform similar tasks in both cases?

taz42zero · #23 Post by **taz42zero** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:53 pm

yes i did, i was looking to do as close to the same as possible with the same applications so i could get a fair comparison. i lost about 1-1.5 hours of battery life going to vista. i also have rc1 though, not sure if they have improved on battery life in rc2....

#24 Post by **tomh009** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:27 pm

taz42zero wrote:yes i did, i was looking to do as close to the same as possible with the same applications so i could get a fair comparison. i lost about 1-1.5 hours of battery life going to vista. i also have rc1 though, not sure if they have improved on battery life in rc2....

Take a look at the battery life thread in the T60 forum:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=33136

Badger reports about 13.5W power consumption in XP (with wireless on), 16.5W in Vista, running Aero. That's approximately a 20% drop, with Aero turned on. The drop without Aero would be less.

How much does your 1-1.5h drop correspond to in percentage terms? Can you do the same check in terms of actual power consumption? (And was your Vista test with beta 1 or beta 2?)

taz42zero · #25 Post by **taz42zero** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:58 pm

yeah, i'll do that check tonight or tomorrow, i left my laptop at home and won't be home till late. after reading that thread, i am curious as well to see the wattage outputs, and never thought about turning off the ultrabay drive until now, good link! will report back.....

and thats with rc1, build 5600(iirc)....

taz42zero · #26 Post by **taz42zero** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:27 pm

i checked the difference and left the results in the office, but it was about a 3.5-4W increase in battery consumption from xp pro to vista rc1 without aero, so about the same as badger, 20% increase. thats with wireless on, bluetooth off...

#27 Post by **tomh009** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:33 pm

taz42zero wrote:i checked the difference and left the results in the office, but it was about a 3.5-4W increase in battery consumption from xp pro to vista rc1 without aero, so about the same as badger, 20% increase. thats with wireless on, bluetooth off...

Consistency is good -- at least here, so that we can establish what the Vista impact is. I don't know what version Badger is running, though, and I don't know whether it's foolish to hope that the final version will be better.

And I also don't know what in Vista is causing the increase. Without Aero, the UI is not so different. Are there processes that chew up the CPU or keep the disk busy in Vista?

sehh · #28 Post by **sehh** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 4:46 am

tomh009 wrote:
taz42zero wrote:And I also don't know what in Vista is causing the increase. Without Aero, the UI is not so different. Are there processes that chew up the CPU or keep the disk busy in Vista?

Yes there are.

Vista has several additional pre-defined scheduled operations that run in the background, including defragment.

Plus, several new services (networking discovery services, etc etc).

dfumento · #29 Post by **dfumento** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:03 am

Is there a way to turn off the background defrag when on battery?

gearguy · #30 Post by **gearguy** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 2:26 pm

Now although this may seem odd, has anyone noticed a difference between running Windows XP with Classic against Windows XP with an 'XP' theme enabled?

I know there is technically not much rendering involved, but still, gradients are bound to use more ram than grey boxes, non?

Battery life in XP vs. Vista

Battery life in XP vs. Vista

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