XP Still Beats Windows 7 in Netbook Battery Life

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brockh

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They test it by "continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi" which doesn't show much of anything. For all we know, unless they meticulously use the exact same web pages at the exact same time with the exact same content, there could've been huge differences. Flash usage for example is a huge, huge disparity if it differed between viewings.

Why not test it by running movies? Tests using media content stress all parts of the system (CPU, GPU, & HDD) over a period of time and truly show you how efficient the operating system is. If I remember correctly Windows 7 was able to best Windows XP in this regard in tests released before the operating system was even finalized.

Also as previously mentioned, turning Aero-glass off could very well save that 45 minutes. It also doesn't specify which power mode was used which is odd. I just find it convenient that there's no method listed as to their testing.

This test, developed in the LAPTOP labs, replicates continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi until the battery is completely drained. Starting with a full battery, a notebook runs a script that visits 60 popular Web sites in a loop, pausing 33 seconds on each, then closing and reopening the Firefox browser with the next page. The test is run in Power Saver battery mode, with the screen at 40 percent brightness, and the notebook’s settings are tweaked to prevent it from entering standby mode or going into hibernation.

How mundane...
 

randomizer

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[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]I was under the impression most service packs were 99% of updates already released in one "servicepack" plus a few new ones?[/citation]
Basically they are. It's not like Linux where your kernel gets updated every few months. The kernel of Windows only changes notably when you upgrade to the next version. If battery life isn't as good as XP now, it won't be later. Maybe Windows 8 will do better.
 

wintermint

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I'm hoping laptop manufacturers will consider Apple's technique with longer battery life and better charging by using irremovable batteries, and make it an option like whether you want it to be removable or not.
 

WheelsOfConfusion

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[citation][nom]wintermint[/nom]I'm hoping laptop manufacturers will consider Apple's technique with longer battery life and better charging by using irremovable batteries, and make it an option like whether you want it to be removable or not.[/citation]
That's a terrible idea. The fact that the batteries are irremovable doesn't mean anything for battery life, it's the size of the battery itself that determines it. You'd need a different case for removable vs. irremovable too.
 

bboysil

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[citation][nom]marsax73[/nom]Well duh! If the OS can run on 100 megs of memory and barely touch the swap file, yeah it will last longer. I had Vista on a laptop and all I saw was my hard drive light constantly blinking (and it had 3 gigs of memory).[/citation]
Maybe you had indexing and superfetch turned on
 

bboysil

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[citation][nom]guess who[/nom]Sure, if you were working on something really important and your machine died half your before you were done, you would say: "Man, I am glad I switched to W7"...[/citation]
But if it would die half way through you're work, wouldn't that mean that it would die at about 60% on an XP machine?
Plus, maybe with Windows 7 you can do more work in less amount of time with the help of the UI which is easier to use so at the end of the day you would do half of your work with both OSes until the battery runs out but with Win7 you get an extra hour to do something else. Ever thought of that?? LOL I use a desktop so I don't care about these issues, just saying :p
 

bboysil

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[citation][nom]ProDigit80[/nom]Great Article!!At least some truth out there!Not only netbooks, but laptops and desktops as well!Funny, but this morning I thought to myself: "XP All the way!!".I may never switch over to 7, until perhaps XP's next next next operating system; this all due to the automatic defragging process in the background of the Vista (and clones).Vista's defrag in the long run is causing notebooks to run REALLY slow!!In XP I can manually defrag without having to fear the automatic process will interfere.So far Vista's (and probably 7's) automatic defrag is one of the worst additions to the OS![/citation]
WTF man? just switch it off and run it when you want just like you did in XP...
 

audiomasta

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Batteries have been a very neglected part of consumer electronics for decades now...it's time they did some thing about it.
 

audiomasta

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Eventually we will just need to invent better batteries...

The OS and PC components can't continue to get better if the batteries don't get their fair share of improvements

Agreed, batteries have been a very neglected part of consumer electronics for decades now...it's time the battery company’s stopped cashing in on their monopoly, and did something about it :D


 

sorin7486

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[citation][nom]gwellin[/nom]Wait, Stop the press. Are you telling me that a more demanding OS that only been released for a couple of week isn't as battery efficient as a "How many years old highly polished" OS. Thank you captain obvious.[/citation]
I wouldn't call XP polished :p
 

randomizer

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[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]XP will beat Win7 if they release new service pack and add directx 11 on it , and u can change the XP theme to eyecandy with some desktop mod .[/citation]
They didn't add DX10, what makes you think they will add DX11? Microsoft want XP to die a quick death. Get over it.
 

sonofliberty08

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[citation][nom]randomizer[/nom]They didn't add DX10, what makes you think they will add DX11? Microsoft want XP to die a quick death. Get over it.[/citation]
i didn't said they will , i said "if" !!
that's why , M$ was forcing u to bought it lousy vista for not adding dx10 to xp , and those pc idiots like eyecandy even it was a lousy os .
 

randomizer

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[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]i didn't said they will , i said "if" !!that's why , M$ was forcing u to bought it lousy vista for not adding dx10 to xp , and those pc idiots like eyecandy even it was a lousy os .[/citation]
You can't expect MS to continue promoting an old OS. It's just bad business. Vista is still fairly new by Windows lifetime standards, so that's why it's getting DX11 as well. Also, Windows XP doesn't support Windows Display Driver Model, so it's not possible to run DirectX 10 on it anyway without a significant change to the OS, something that a Service Pack is not designed to do.
 

ethanolson

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I wonder why this is so consistent with everyone. I get better battery life with 7 than I did with Vista or XP. Granted... it's only about 20 minutes, but it's more.
 
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Same goes for electric vehicles. I mean I can have a wind turbine at home and solar cells but if it costs me $1,300 for 1khw worth of highend batteries for a car we have a problem. I sure wouldn't mine an electric car with 4wd, 50kw motors in each wheel with electric brakes, with a 50kwh+ battery pack. 250 mile+ range, 266 Electric HP, awesome handling =)
 
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I'll toss Damn Small Linux on a netbook. Won't beat that battery life!
 

ossie

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Oh, yummy boy... Still haven't got it? To be popular with wintarded micro$uxx fankiddies, you just have to praise windblow$, like m$'s marketingdroids do all the time, whatever it takes. It doesn't count to fankiddies, if all the hype was just pure B$, to line up m$'s pockets...
 

razor512

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thats the problem with windows microsoft doesn't know what an upgrade is

When a company like adobe or autodesk releases a new version of their software. they always advertise faster speed and even though they may list higher requirements the main app uses less memory which leaves more memory for the new render engine option that you can choose

with windows the new versions only get slower on the same hardware.

PS on netbooks with windows 7, all of the glass crap and other stuff like it is disabled when on battery power

the problem comes from windows 7 having a higher CPU usage and a higher memory usage and increased hard drive usage for simple things.

for the most users, if there anything new that you want to do that requires windows 7? if you go from xp to windows 7, and do the same stuff you are doing now, then you will only be giving up performance and getting the same work done slower
 

razor512

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[citation][nom]killerb255[/nom]@Razor512:Windows 7 Netbooks typically come with Starter Edition, which doesn't even have Aero to begin with...[/citation]

yep and even if they did, part of windows 7's power saving is to disable the extra resource hogging effects

also windows 7 also boast at how much more control they have over dynamically turning off parts of the system to save power but it still has worst battery life because it is a resource hog and requires more hard drive activity, more memory usage and more CPU usage to do even the mose simple things. the UI in windows xp is generated by vectors especially if you use the windows classic theme, it only takes a few lines of code, probably only a few bytes of data to make a complex window. this is why windows and things open pretty much instantly in windows xp, in vista and windows 7, they rely on things like superfetch to preload those windows so they open quickly if you need to use them, the problem with that is if you open a large app, all of the superfetch data is pushed into virtual memory. wen a properly tweaked copy of windows xp, windows only uses about 50MB of memory or less

while windows 7 also uses vector, it also has to load textures, filters, graphics and a lot of other data that puts more work on the entire system to load, so it loads slower.

many people who speak highly of windows 7 speak down on windows xp for the simple fact that it is old, they don't have much of a arguement

old code doesn't mean bad code, it just means it is old but still gets the job done.

example, in the program spinrite (one of the best hard drive recovery tools I have ever used) while it has been updated, most of the code in it is nearly 20 years old, but it still works great.

old code that has been patched like crazy is generally more secure because almost everything that can be done has been done and patched, it is impossible to write perfect code.
 

brockh

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You're delusional, besides the part about it being impossible to write perfect code.
 
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