Windows 7 on Latitude E6400

Battery wear def favors the macbook. Its my sisters and she's owned it for 6 months. I've owned the E6400 for around 2-3 weeks. Mp3 playback was using VLC, which as far as I know is pretty light weight. I guess I was expecting microsoft to pull out all the stops in terms of battery life. I guess I was wrong. Windows 7 is still pretty awesome, but I'll stick with vista and use the saved money to buy an extra 9 cell battery

 

Hang on.. you are with Vista now, and you had reduced battery with Win7?
If that is the case, then it's clear that it's a driver related issue. Anyway, I'll test on my side and see... I just have a problem where about every partitioning software refuse to partition my C drive.. I even did a disk error check and auto-fix. I think it went pita... I'll try one last software else it's a full re-image (thank you Vista Complete PC backup )

 

Is there a pressing need to install the Matrix Storage driver or manager?
Wouldn't one be equally served by using the native Windows 7 driver?

 

My battery life is pretty similar in vista/xp/7. I tweaked everything up until I was able to get 5+ hours use if I'm only web surfing(w/o the mp3 in the background). I was hoping Microsoft would pull up some battery life magic with windows 7, but I totally understand why the OS is running lower battery life than OSX. Apple only needs to support a few laptop models so it can tailor its OS towards specific hardware. MS has to support thousands of laptops.

 

You can't compare Macbook vs the E6400 without controlling the variables. What are the respective battery capacities? The LCD type and backlight brightness? Backlit keyboard? Graphics card? Hard disk? CPU type and speed? BT? Etc. You got the idea.

 

They're all actually pretty similar, except I'm using RMclock to artifically lower the speeds on the E6400, while on the macbook, nothing is done.

The only differences is that the latitude is a lower power 45nm cpu and a higher power graphics chip, while the Macbook is using a lower powered graphics chip with a more power hungry 65nm cpu.

 

Power between smaller dies on laptop is usually not significant. It's probably the GPU. The Quadro NVS 160 has 8 mighty processors. In comparison for your personal knowledge, the desktop Geforce GTX 285 video card has a mighty 240 processors. Cool no? Anyway, more processors require more power to run. And that is one of the reason why the GTX 285 require 2 additional power plugs to make it run.

 

What features (if any) does the IMSM application/driver combo provide that the driver, by itself, does not?

 

I'm actually in the process of testing with the X4500MHD E6400 I have right now. So far, it doesn't look too good.

 

I'm not sure what "pretty similar" to you means. The MacBook has a 13.3 inch screen and your is 14.1". There is a significant area difference right there. If I am not mistaken, the MacBook has a 45WHr battery, while the E6400 has a 54WHr battery. That's a 20% difference there. You really need to compare power draw, and then normalize for the screen size. And then there is the graphics card dissipation, which can be substantially different. And which version of the MacBook are you comparing to? How about HDD speed?