QOTW: Has Windows 7 Affected Your Battery Life?

[BallistaMan]

I haven't noticed any physical capacity drops on my machines. The only machine that could be classified as "losing" battery life would be my Macbook Pro (which is actually a dedicated Windows machine that I keep around to scare Mac fanboys on campus). Like another user mentioned above, it does indeed have a shorter battery life when switching from OSX to 7, but that's been a known issue since the beta came out. 7 has better battery management overall, but on Apple machines, OSX is better tuned to that specific battery.

Honestly, it still has a good 4.5 hours on a full charge, so if MSFT changes anything it'll be more of a perk than some much-needed fix.

 

[tengen]

I'm an owner of an XPS M1530, and got my laptop in June 2008. Installed Windows 7 when the RC came out. My 9-cell was supposed to last me ~6 hours, but now I am lucky to even get 15 minutes of battery life. The battery also chooses not to charge itself when it feels like it (it is currently stuck at 10%), and sometimes when it does, misreports the % charge.

 

[dedhorse]

I have a two year old HP dv2600. With Vista I had about 2.5 hours of battery life. Since installing Windows 7, I'm lucky if I get 15 minutes, plus the message that I should replace my battery.

Since it is two years old, I figured it's feasible the battery is just old. Now, I don't know. I only noticed the terrible battery life after installing Windows 7, so there must be a connection.

 

[uutf]

Upgrading my latitude e4200 with 128G SSD and 3G DDR3 from XP to 7 got me 10-15% increase in battery life. Not a gaming notebook though. Disabled 8.3 filenames, Prefetch, defrag and indexing services, ipv6 etc.

 

[wintermint]

I haven't inserted my battery.. I run it off the charger the first day I got it D: and there are lots of things that can wear down battery life.. what if they were to be watching some movies, playing games, put their laptop on heavy load etc.

 

[micky_lund]

ahhh...who needs batteries with a desktop?

 

[Guest]

I have 3 laptops running it and windows 7 calculates battery time on the go, so basically it can change if u are running something to not running something... thus showing 2 hours vs. 4 hours.

 

[haunted one]

I don't think Win7 is reducing battery charge. It's simply reporting the charge falsely. I've had this problem in the past.

 

[optical10]

My HP Tx2 is saying "change the Battery" after months using Win7 64bit after dual boot with the original Vista 32bit. If you use your laptop for 12 hour a day on mains your going to evenually see problems.
Gizmodo or Engadget.com say that MS say Win7 uses the BIOS to control battery managment and it the manu's issue or something if I remember correctly.

 

[little-ninja-man]

Windows 7 I found gave me more battery life than windows xp or windows vista. not much but still better than nothing. Also why don't you have a pole system so we can see how many people got better battery life vs worse battery life, it seems common sense to do that by default

 

[dada81]

Ditto for me...HP 6710b here...seems a lot of HP's are affected.
Mine went from 3 hours to 1 going from Win7 Beta2 to RTM. This went on for ~3 months and I thought it was an old battery. But now I don't think so and changing back to Ubuntu now gives me the same 1 hour mark.
I own a legal Win7 Ultimate (MSDN premium subscriber) and would like to at least get an apology from M$ if they hurt my battery since I doubt I'll get a new replacement battery from them (living in Serbia-no class action suits here-wish there were.

 

[elel]

Why ask us? This is a perfect easy article topic.

 

[Snipergod87]

I use this tool cakked RM Clock which will also show my battery capacity and current draw. When i purchased the battery it was advertised at 56Wh, actual designed capacity is 52Wh, after some uasane its down to 48.9Wh. I emailed Dell and they quickly responded since the computer is less than a month old, I will keep it for awhile longer see if its keeps going down, I use the battery regularly. Some people dont take proper care of their battery and end up with 15 minute battery life.

 

[arlandi]

my toshiba never have a long battery live to begin with, so i can't say that i'm affected by this issue.

 

[jacobdrj]

On my brother's 9" Acer Aspire One, he went from about 7 hours to about 8 hours going from XP to W7 using the 9 cell battery. I gained about a half an hour going from Vista to W7 on my TX2500Z with the 8 cell battery. My other brother went from 7 hours to almost 8 hours on his DV6000 with a 12 cell battery going also from Vista to W7.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]micky_lund[/nom]ahhh...who needs batteries with a desktop?[/citation]
Anyone with mission critical hardware/software. Running a Cyberpower UPS that gives me 18 minutes of battery life in the event of an outage. That is running 2 22" LCD's, my DSL modem, and my computer running a Q6600, an 8800GT and 4 hard drives, and 3 Ultra Kaze fans... I notice those fans can increase my wattage by almost 50 Watts... Go figure.

 

[indran1412]

I don't know whether its Win7 's fault or not, my battery was supposed to last 2 1/2 hours(Dell XPS 1530). In Vista, it depleted to 2 hours only. In Win7 it reduced to 15 minutes only . Now I'm forced to use my charger every time i boot my laptop(feels like desktop now). I'm a heavy gamer , so battery overcharging is unavoidable. Its my fault here . I should have removed the battery and use only the charger when i'm doing heavy work.

 

[lord_mur2002]

All this talk of removing the battery, did I not read here on Tom's that your laptop with some of these powerful Core2 parts and Amd chips require some power from the battery while plugged into the wall to handle loads due to the fact the plug in power supply only sends enough power to charge?
I was under the belief that laptops need the battery to operate at peek performance.

 

[Guest]

I have a Dell Latitude E6500 with extra capacity battery sticking out the back. It used to give me 4.5-5 hours on XP consistently. Now I have Win 7 and the battery life is down to 3 hours. I thought its probably the batteries dropping in efficiency untill i saw the reports on the internet...

 

[zebow2002]

0 problems here on my HP pavilion DV7 2200 machine, battery lasts 3+ hours on windows 7 clean install including the HP essential updates for Windows 7 wich might make a difference for Hp machines.

 

[Guest]

Acer TravelMate 6592 -- after installing Windows 7 I have got the "replace your battery message" and the battery life dropped down significantly.

 

[RogueKitsune]

the battery life on my laptop, a toshiba, has actually gained about 10-30 mins since i switched to win 7 from vista. I actually average 1:45-2:15 hours depending on what i am doing instead of an average around 1:30

 

[marius-x]

win 7 has IMPROVED my batteryRunTime,
(XP: 3.5H -> win7: almost 4H)
this is mainly thanks to the PowerConfig options
which i optimized/customized for battery saving

now i can't tell if win7 has any impact on its batteryLife,
everything seems OK for now

 

[marius-x]

this article IS mistaking battery runtime (how many hours your battery lasts when unplugged) with battey life (how many times the battery can be recharged "during its life time" until it completely dies)

oh its Jane again who wrote this article,
no doubt she's mistaking it

 

[razor512]

while some benchmarks show windows 7 sometimes offering better battery life, thats due to it's ability to automatically turn off things that are not in use such as bluetooth, wifi and other features. but what many test don't show is that the OS uses a lot more power when doing normal things such as navigating the OS, moving windows around and other basic but common tasks

There is a lot more hard drive activity needed to open even a folder or other small things in the OS because it has to load the useless eyecndy along with the window, pretty much everything across the board uses more CPU cycles and memory, the system uses more power when loading something than when loading nothing. even if computers have gotten faster over the years, thats no reason to make a OS bloated and slower, in favor of eye candy and other crap, it only causes lower performance and lower battery life.

Most users don't use their laptops for anything more than basic use, so the laptops pretty much run close to idle 90% of the time on most OS but since windows 7 is bloated, there more spikes in CPU usage, GPU usage, hard drive activity, this all adds up to a higher power usage under windows 7 and vista as compared to an older OS.
A laptop battery can generally handle 500 charge/discharge cycles before becoming useless. but if you constantly put more strain on the battery by increasing the speed of the discharge, you will reduce the charge/discharge cycles that the battery can handle.

this is how it is with all batteries.

for example, my friend has a windows mobile based phone (windows mobile 6.1 I think)
where he lives, he is stuck with either dialup or satellite and he doesn't want to pay for 2 3g services so he has his pocketpc/phone setup to act as a wifi access point for all 2 computers in the house. when doing bandwidth intensive things, the CPU usage of the phone skyrockets, and because theres more than one person sharing the connection, the phone constantly has a higher than normal CPU usage and thus the battery doesn't last the full 500 charge cycles, it is more like 200-300 cycles, but since replacement batteries are around $6-7, he can change them easily.

Batteries don't like high drain, it causes more damage to them