F3Ja, high power consumption in Vista 64

Well, relative to XP at least. I installed Vista Business 64bit this weekend, spending quite some time digging around to install the correct drivers. Now, for as far as I can determine, I have correctly installed the drivers. Ati Powerplay works, too (I had to used modded Catalyst 8.2 desktop drivers).

However, while I installed the only ATK 0100 ACPI driver that I could find for my laptop and Vista, it didn't reduce my CPU speed to 1ghz as it did normally in XP. Expected battery life with wireless on and the screen at its darkest was about 3 hours (used to be 5 hours+ on XP).

So, I decided to install RMClock (which requires a workaround). It gladly downclocks and undervolts my T7200, but it also shows that my CPU doesn't enter C3 or C4 modes. I had this problem in XP as well, which was caused by the infamous USB bug. Installing the appropriate KB patch fixed that in XP and made the RMclock window look like this:


when RMClock shows CPU usage to be higher than is indicated by the OS, that's an indication that the CPU enters its deep sleep states C3 or C4.

Now, in Vista, I have the same problem. High power consumption while working on DC power: about 18watt with wireless on, bluetooth off and the screen at its lowest, while it used to be about 13 to 14 watt under the same conditions in XP. For Vista, such a patch does not exist for as far as I have been able to determine.

I've seen it working like it should on my laptop just an hour or two ago, when I disabled my wireless adapter. After that, I installed the wireless console to disable Bluetooth, and it kept working. Then I installed the Intel 3945ABG drivers from the Intel site, it still worked. One reboot later, it stopped working, power consumption was back up and it hasn't worked since. I tried uninstalling the 3945ABG drivers, but I can't seem to figure out how.

Does anyone here have experience in solving this problem? Or could anyone tell me how I can safely revert to the Microsoft supplied drivers for my wireless card?

 

Well I can only recommend a solution to the last question, you could use System Restore to revert to the point before driver installation. Or even rollback the driver (from the device properties screen in WinXP, should be similar in Vista?)

I don't have experience with the C3/C4 deepsleep problems.

 

I tried restoring, it seems to have restored the wireless driver to the one supplied by Microsoft. Alas, it didn't have the desired effect

After some digging, I found this gem in the Event Viewer:
Performance power management features on processor 0 are disabled due to a firmware problem. Check with the computer manufacturer for updated firmware.

I guess that's the reason that Vista won't downclock my CPU at all without RMClock

 

BIOS update?

 

I'm already running the latest and greatest 208 T00 for my laptop, but I guess I'll try downgrading to the 206 I used previously, and maybe to the 207 (which has grain issues)

I'm also going to try a completely clean install, installing the ATK100 drivers first, before SP1.

Another nice bummer is that the BIOS is forced into IDE compatibility mode for the SATA drive, I can't disable it :-.

 

I flashed 207AS, which instantly brought back the grainy filthiness that unfortunately came with the X1600, but 'lo and behold!



I'm going to tinker with it a bit, but at least I know I'm not going completely bonkers

Thanks for your input

edit: I forgot to mention:
Some processor performance power management features have been disabled due to a known firmware problem. Check with the computer manufacturer for updated firmware.

But at least it runs at 1ghz instead of 2ghz, even without the help of RMClock

 

Hmm. So it seems that it's a BIOS problem. They probably inadvertently introduced a bug when they fixed the graininess issue... Looks like it's up to you which problem you care about the most.

 

Well that's what I thought, until I tried to reproduce the power saving situation. I found that difficult, but ultimately it was very easy: just wait!

The problem was never caused by wireless adapters, bluetooth, mice, BIOSes or what say you, it was simply Vista churning the HD for some goodness that I have yet to discover, at a rate of 5 to 20 mb/s! It does so after every reboot for quite a while, even when all programs are loaded. It doesn't seem to affect performance much as I never really noticed it being sluggy or anything. I just kinda ignored the HD light, figuring it was indexing or something with low priority. As soon as it stops (and it does eventually, after 5 minutes or so), the power consumption drops to XP levels

 

Aha. OK, so there was a nil problem in the first place. No matter, good you got to the bottom of this

I think it's Vista indexing/superfetching or something. It does a lot of that stuff. Sorry it didn't cross my mind.

 

Well there are still a few things to figure out, but at least I've been able to reproduce the desired effect by rebooting without AC power and waiting 5 minutes.

If superfetching actually works, that'd be one good reason for me to stick with Vista