Battery life in XP vs. Vista

[jtheun]

Indexing was all done yesterday. There is pretty much nothing going on on the computer. CPU usage at 4-8%, no disk activity.

[tomh009]

So your CPU is running at 800 (?) MHz?

[jtheun]

i am not sure. how do i find that out?

[tomh009]

Hmmm, not sure where Vista displays it. My Computer > Properties does show the current speed on XP. Otherwise RMClock or NHC would show it for you.

[jtheun]

Neither of those two programs seem to run on Vista... argh. But on the Computer | Properties screen it says the CPU is 2.000 GHz (although I suspect that is just stating the obvious that the CPU *can* run at 2GHz)...

[tomh009]

Neither NHC or RMClock will even install on Vista? You should be able to run at least RMClock for sure; see here:
http://forum.rightmark.org/topic.cgi?id=6:898

[jtheun]

OK, got RMClock running (version 2.2)

Here is what I see while running off of battery, external display only, on my 2GHz machine, sucking an incredible 22W:

Core Clock: 997MHz
Core Temp: 54C
Profile for battery: Power Saving
VID range from 0.95V (Index 0) to 1.15V (Index 6)
On the Power Saving tab, I don't have anything checked... should I mess with that?

[warder]

RMClock looks a neat tool.

Does anyone have an XP install on a z60m they can run it on?

I have the Vista numbers but it would be good to see the matching XP discharge rate.

Please say check backlight is at the lowest level it testing.

Thanks!

[RaysMD]

Decided to revive this thread. It seems that Vista uses approximately 1.0 to 1.5 more watts than XP. Right now as I type this, I'm using close to 16.17watts with XP Pro and while under Vista 64bit it's 18.5watts.


This is with same power manager settings, display brightness, etc. You can check my having your power manager icon on the task bar display the wattage.


guess, there aren't that many advantages to Vista if you're concerned about battery usage.

[hellosailor]

Somewhere on their web site, Intel is all excited because Vista, when running on the newer motherboards that are designed for it, has the ability to power down different sub-systems and put them to sleep in a near-zero power state, which is supposed to let Vista get better power savings.

I'd suspect that if Vista is acting hungrier on any particular machine, the first question is whether the mb is Vista-certified for power savings. And the next is the quagmire called "exactly what is running on this box" which isn't always easy to figure out.

[msb0b]

I have noticed that Power Manager's presets do not use optimal settings for power conservation. In some cases, the presets are backwards. I recommend using Vista's advanced power settings to make the tweaks and leave Power Manager alone.

To get to the advanced power settings, from Windows Mobility Center, click on the battery icon, "Change plan settings", "Change advanced power settings" and "Change settings that are currently unavailable".

The settings to change are:

• Wireless power saving mode
  USB selective suspend setting
  PCI Express link state power management
  Search and Indexing

Make sure each setting has max power saving on battery and max performance when plugged in.

With these changes, I was able to reduce my T60's power draw from >20W to 13W. I can get almost 4 hours out of a 56Wh 6-cell battery. I think this is as good as it gets even without battery stretch.

[RaysMD]

ok, not bad. I've reduced it from 18.5 to 17.25watts with your settings. I'm still on 1GB RAM. With XP Pro that was all that I needed. I'll be installing more RAM, so hopefully, it'll reduce power consumption a little bit more. i.e., less HD access.


not bad...