XP/Vista Battery Life & Compatibility

Hi,
I'm currently looking to get an Sony Vaio SR soon with Intel X4500 for max possible battery life. I need to decide whether I should get Vista Home Premium or XP Pro on it.
Now, I've been using Windows XP since it came out, and I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista.

Battery Life:
Battery life is most important to me.
How does Vista compare to XP in terms of battery life? - pretty much everything I've read on the internet shows XP beating out Vista, sometimes by as large a margin as one hour. Just google XP vs Vista battery life.



Compatibility:
The following applications I will definitely need to use:
MS Office 07
Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Mainly Premiere Pro CS3, Soundbooth, OnLocation, Photoshop)
Finale
Sibelius
SONAR
Audacity
Some sort of media player for watching House.

Is Vista compatible with all of these?

*EDIT*:
OKAY, all of you that replied, could you tell me if your laptop came with Vista and you downgraded to XP or came with XP and upgraded to Vista?

**EDIT TWO**:
How more more memory does Vista use than XP?



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From my personal experiance Vista SP1 has a better battery life than XP and SP0.

Vista SP0= 1:15
XP= 1:20
Vista SP1= 1:30

 

Those are just estimates, right?

Man, this is also an ass tearing dilemma, cuz I'm reading some stuff that says XP gets FARRR better battery life than Vista and some stuff that says Vista SP1 is lotz better than Vista SP0

E.g.
SP1+: Vista SP0 vs SP1 (far bottom comment)
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080213/vista-sp1-power-efficiency-improvements/

SP1 does nothing: Vista SP0 vs Sp1
http://reviews.cnet.com/windows/windows-vista-sp1/4505-3672_7-32853289.html

XP owns:
Just search XP vs Vista Battery Life.



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You need to get a comparison for that Sony model since on mine I found that XP and Vista (no SP) got roughly the same battery life. So it's not just an XP vs Vista matter but rather, how's the power management for the laptop in XP vs Vista?

 

I have a Dell e1705 that ran XP Pro SP2. This is a 17" laptop, and battery life under XP was pretty poor. At best, I would be about 1:45 before my battery died. Under Vista, I got about 2:15, and that's with Aero and the sidebar running. When I bought a larger battery, XP was still poor compared to Vista. I can squeeze almost 3:30 out of a charge under Vista with my 9 cell battery.

YMMV.

 

Wow, this is a real asstearer.

Does Vista have better power management or something? And would it definitely get better battery life if I turned off Aero and used Vista Battery Saver?

Well, so if I had to pick one or the other for best possible battery life, which would you guys recommend? Vista's the way of the future?

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Looks like that model has Vista by default and from a quick googling, all those programs seem to work/have a workaround if they don't work by default. Just give it a try and if that doesn't work, put XP on.

 

Well, I can just get it with XP by default off Portable One. And I really dont want to go having to hunt down a copy of XP later.

All the battery benchies (MobileMark) seem to have been done with Vista, so should I stick with Vista?

And still see questions regarding power management in my previous post.



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You changed it on me.

I've heard that Vista's power management is better than XP's and I'd be inclined to believe it since you get more features/eye candy (both possibly battery eating) yet still keep the same battery life.

From personal tests, I've disabled the sidebar since I found it useless and aero makes no difference for me in battery life.

I'd just stick with Vista, people don't give it enough credit and the ones who say its so slow are the ones who are trying to run it on old hardware that barely suited XP. (I ran Vista Ultimate on my laptop with a 1.66GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, before I upgraded to my 2.4GHz (purely work related) and it flew, much better than XP).

 

This may not answer all your questions, but... here's an interesting article about Aero and battery life: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/05/14/aero-and-battery-life.aspx

Anyway... if you get Vista Business, you'll get the XP Pro downgrade rights... so you can test them both. I wouldn't expect a really major difference though. The SR and its components will probably be designed more with Vista in mind... which may or may not matter at all.

Personally, I wouldn't expect a really big difference either way. Which OS has better battery life probably depends a lot on your settings, your hardware, your software, your drivers, and what you're doing... which is probably the main reason for all the disagreement about it.

 

I notice that XPs power managemeent is not as good as Vista's. I ddid downgrade to XP solely for the performance increase. But battery life wise. I feel it has decreased with XP

 

So XP = perf and Vista = battery life...
Hrm.

Well, I doubt the perf difference would be noticeable? And it's not like I'd be playing games on it.

 

So XP = perf and Vista = battery life...
Hrm.

Well, I doubt the perf difference would be noticeable? And it's not like I'd be playing games on it.

And compatibility with pretty much everything?

 

Double post...anyway, anything you pretty much read out on the internet is incredibly baised towards Vista....Even the benchmarks. Here's the simple lowdown for Vista:

1) It plays MOST games right out of the box, even better than XP on some depending on set up
2) It is actually in real life usage just as fast or faster than XP depending on hardware
3) Battery life is the same or better depending on hardware

etc, etc, etc. As you can see, it's just overall better because it can do some things better and faster than on XP. XP is still great and all, but more for people who don't want to upgrade to Vista or have really crappy hardware. Case closed.

 

On my Latitude D630 I get a lot more battery time with XP than I ever did with Vista, I would estimate it to about 25-30% more batterytime.

 

greeattt... conflicting answers.

Well all the schools at my computer - desktops and portable laptops - are on XP... so... ? I mean my friends with Vista laptops can connect to the wifi just fine, etc... jw.

OKAY, all of you that replied, could you tell me if your laptop came with Vista and you downgraded to XP or came with XP and upgraded to Vista?

 

My laptop originally came with Vista Ultimate. When I got it I tested the battery life, installed XP Pro and retested the battery life. The results were the same and I wasn't about to triple boot just to play games 3% faster so I wiped XP off and left Vista.

 

Well, I emailed Portable One, and they said the SR comes with the OS Power Management along with Sony's own Vaio Power Management.

If I were to use solely Vaio Power Management in both XP and Vista, would they yield me the same battery life?

TT_TT

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Your going to have to go ask some Sony users. Although, your pretty much guaranteed that the Manufacturer's programs are just bloatware, and do absolutely nothing to help battery life. The first thing I did when I got my Asus, was to get rid of all of their "helpful" apps....I use Vista's built in power management, works much better.

BTW, you'll always get some conflicting answers, but for your purpose I think Vista is plenty good with the right specs.

 

Well, P1 tells me bloatware removal stills leaves the OS power management and Sony's power management, so it must not be bloatware/have some use, no?

Well, the reason I'm so worried is that - other than battery life - I'm getting lots of memory (more than my 2GB desktop) so I could load up lots samples when I'm composing. If Vista takes up a load of it compared to XP, then my benefits for getting the extra RAM are nullified.

 

With the wide variety answers; lets add this into account!
Get Vista: Home Premium and enjoy your Snipping Tool!

 

I'm back....

Now, how much more memory does Vista use than XP?
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this is for a t61- with vista home(32-bit) it would use about 800-900mb just idling(like maybe opening folders, or on the internet). that was without antivirus. my desktop with vista business uses about 1gb when running internet and antivirus. with xp pro(32 bit), it would use about 400ish with antivirus, firewall, and after i did the sp3 update.

as far as startup times, xp is also a bit faster.

 

i have an acer travelmate 5320 with a t2310 core 2 and the battery life is far better in vista (i have the chip undervolted to) in xp i got approx 2 hours
no under vista i get between 2hours 30 and 3 hours just for the better power managment it has.

 

About battery, Vista does a better management of it, but in depends a lot on the model, some work better on vista while others work better on XP. My XPS 1330 works FAR BETTER in Vista (like 45mins more). Also BIOS version has something to say here.

As for memory, Vista will initially eat more memory for sure, but again it manages it better than XP, specially when running a lot of apps. I've always had problems with XP freeing memory. This does not happen (or at least it happens less often) in Vista.

my 2 cents

 

My old Alienware came with XP, and I tried Vista. My battery life plummeted to about 10 minutes, mostly because there was not a chipset driver for my mortherboard under Vista. On the other hand, My wife has an m15x with a spare battery in the smartbay. She got about 3 hours out of the box, and now gets 5-6 hours with Vista Battery Saver installed (turns off Aero, sidebar, and the dedicated graphics chip). On newer hardware, I would not hesitate to run Vista for both performance and battery life.