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    Virtualization and Battery Life

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by xaueious, Jan 30, 2010.

  1. xaueious

    xaueious Notebook Enthusiast

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    Does anyone have any solid experience with enabling virtualization and its effect on battery life?

    Virtualization is disabled on my Thinkpad SL410 right now and I want to know if enabling it has any negative effects.
     
    xaueious, Jan 30, 2010
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  2. cvec7

    cvec7 Notebook Evangelist

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    I have it enabled on my T60, and have not noticed any sort of battery hit. I did notice a battery hit when I was running 7 and running Virtual PC-XP, but that's to be expected since you're basically running 2 OS'es at once.
     
    cvec7, Jan 30, 2010
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  3. d3mia7

    d3mia7 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Just turning on the feature in the BIOS will have no impact whatsoever.

    Actually running VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox or something will use more battery for sure as you're doing more processing. In that case having the virtualization feature enabled in the BIOS should provide BETTER battery life as it reduces the CPU workload when doing virtualization, in addition to giving better performance to your virtual machines.

    Without the virtualization option enabled, several key memory-related commands have to be handled in software. With it turned on the CPU hardware can handle them directly; this is orders of magnitude more efficient.
     
    d3mia7, Jan 31, 2010
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  4. xaueious

    xaueious Notebook Enthusiast

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    Why do notebook manufactuers disable this feature then?
     
    xaueious, Feb 3, 2010
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  5. thinkpad knows best

    thinkpad knows best Notebook Deity

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    Lower class processor that's VT feature does not work according to standards so they disable it and sell it as a Pentium/Celeron, or downclock it and sell it as a CULV/ULV processor? If you have a processor that supports it you should be able to disable or enable it in BIOS. Or perhaps they disable it just so you will have to buy a higher model just for that reason, and pay more.
     
    thinkpad knows best, Feb 3, 2010
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  6. ckx

    ckx Notebook Evangelist

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    The virtualization feature have some security implications. Theoretically, a malware can take over your machine and run your main OS in a virtual machine, and nobody will be the wiser...
     
    ckx, Feb 3, 2010
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