Vista Battery Hungry?

I was told that having vista on your laptop you will see about a 25% drop in battery life compared to Xp was wondering how true this is as im considering the change and my battery time is not long so i dont want it any less?

 

Not true, unless your power management software interferes with your Intel SpeedStep in Vista (which is, admittedly, a possibility).

 

Some laptops have a 25% drop. This is mostly due to the ACPI that is handeled differently from XP. Mostly when upgrading older laptops that are designed for XP you can run into this problem. It is the manufactuers fault mostly since it mostly means that they made bad ACPI tables. It is also something Linux fans often complain about. It can only be fixed with a bios update or sometimes special Vista drivers.
Lenovo has shown with the T60 that Vista can use the same amount of battery as XP. I also heared that the HP business class laptops work well. I found that upgrading to Vista and using readyboost gives me better battery performance since the hard disk is used less.

 

25% less battery life might not be the case on all systems as has been explained above, but Vista does consume extra power but from my experience it is about 5%-10% mostly due to the fact that the fan runs longer and more frequently compared to XP.

 

What Wave said is probably correct. And what he says about the HP business class notebooks, I can personally vouch for. Atleast my particular model (NC8430). I've experienced between an ever so slight to no change at all in battery time since I installed Vista.

 

Well I've compared to other SZ XP users and I seem to be getting roughly the same amount of battery life with Vista.

 

even though admitedly there is a loss in battery time it isnt that great difference between the two
it also depends on your hardware and the tasks that you were performing whle on battery power
the vista interface is graphic hungry and does need decent graphic power to run which in turn requires more power
it also dpends from person to person as the tasks performed and the background applicatios running etc are different or in short no two systems are completely identical
though there may be loss in battery time it wont be any thing as big as 25% maybe 5-15% at the most as mentioned above
cheers,

 

From what I've read that when using the Aero interface the battery life drops but when not using the interface the battery life equals to XP or better.

 

Or the other way around. The fan runs longer and more frequently because the CPU/GPU have to do more work, generate more heat and thus, use more power.

Anyway, it depends a lot on the hardware. The Aero interface, for example, relies heavily on having a GPU that can do 3d graphics without using too much power.

 

I'm seeing a 5-10% reduction in battery time.

 

Yeah, its the GPU more than the CPU, my CPU temps are pretty much in the same range as it was for XP but the GPU definately runs a good 5-10C hotter under Vista. The lack of powermizer controls in the Nvidia drivers for Vista doesnt help either. Since I dual boot XP/Vista I can definately notice the difference in the GPU temps as well as the fans.

 

Do you guys reckon Nvidia will ever release drivers that will also display the GPU temp., like they did in XP? Those of you who are using modified .inf drivers from laptopvideo2go.com, can you please tell me if you have all the same controls, including the temp feature, in your graphics settings?
I'm really interested to see what my GPU temp. is in Vista.

 

The temp features wont be included in the Nvidia control panel anymore. But it will be part of the separate Ntune software which integrates with the control panel. You can download this software here...
http://www.nvidia.com/object/sysutility.html

 

I have no noticeable battery life drop. In fact, it almost seems as if I've gained 15 minutes.

 

That's a shame!

Thank you so much. I will try that.

 

Battery life on my 9-cell Inspiron E1505 seems to have risen a 15-20 minutes in Vista vs. XP. Tasks I do when on battery usually consist of Word, Internet (Wireless On), and/or Excel.

 

CNET has a good article on decreased battery life with Vista ULTIMATE. HP is aware of this problem and is working on a solution. Even beta testers were reporting such a problem but still Microsoft didn't modify the program. This is only happening on ULTIMATE using Aero and not on other flavors of Vista. I did try the Ultimate version with Aero and did notice that the fan is constantly on.

 

With my setup seeminly the same between xp and vista (same power settings, etc same brightness) I went from ~3-3.5 hrs in xp to ~ 2 hrs in vista.

I'm kinda pissed.

Asus W3J. If anyone has any suggestions, please pm me or post here