XP/Vista Battery Life

I have a Dell Precision M4400 laptop with an Intel P8600 processor and 4GB of ram. I have the HD partitioned and am running XP Pro and Vista Business in a dual boot. I have both set to best performance in the advance settings.

I have both XP and Vista undervolted to the same settings with RMClock. When I check the remaining battery time on the battery icon in the tray, XP will show 45 minutes to 1 hour 15 minutes more remaining time than Vista. This is with the same clock settings and remaining battery percentage.

This is my first experience with Vista. Is Vista that much more power hungry than XP?

Thanks

Herman

 

Set up a custom power profile that fits your needs or: try timing how long time you battery runs IRL, that estimated time may not even be correct, usualy it is not.


Vista should be better when it comes to power savings in every possible way, i have never seen anyone report a lower battery time in vista compared to XP, XP won't take advantage of the most power saving things as it's so old today, so vista will do a better job to keep your battery time be longer.

 

Vista does have one thing going against it. Vista Aero and Sidebar (apparently) actually eats away at battery life pretty significantly - it's probably best if you turn both off if on battery.

Personally, I love Aero but I have Sidebar turned off. I've also turned off Vista's Superfetch (more aggressive than XP) to reduce HDD activity.

I've also set my screen to turn off after 2-3 minutes of inactivity. With that, I can pretty much do all-day computing with a 6-cell Studio 15.

 

Use RMClock too. I find with all those optimizations (undervolted, turning off aero and sidebar) on battery, the differences are miniscule. Try actually draining the battery to a fixed %age since the counter can be inaccurate.

 

I also dual boot and found in actual practice, it's about a 5 to 10% difference with similar usage.

I ran it down where Vista Ultimate lasted 4 hours and 50 minutes while XP Pro lasted 5 hours and 10 minutes under the same settings and similar use.

Keep in mind that if you've just started using Vista, battery life might be a bit lower due to the "thrashing" stage where it's indexing, etc.

 

This will improve your battery life significantly.
http://www.codeplex.com/vistabattery

 

I can recommend getting AeroFoil 1.4.5

it automatically shuts down VistaSidebar when on battery (and starts it again when on AC), it automatically selects the "High Performance" power-profile when on AC, and the "Power Save" profile when on battery... Recommended!