Best OS for longest battery life?

Not sure where to post this but I'll try here.

I would like to know what operating system will give my laptop the longest battery life on a single charge. (Vista, XP, 2000, DOS, OSX, certain linux distro, etc.)

I'd like to set up dual/tri/quad boot and have an OS that can last a long time even if it is text based and I can only type/take notes.

Right now I'm running Vista Home Preimum and I have a HP Pavilion dv2500 Notebook PC.

 

DOS FTW! other than that... win 3.1 or 95.... good luck with drivers

 

OSX will most likely be best among mainstream OS', probably followed by a cut down 2003 install. XP and 2000 are both good for an older OS.

 

It also depends on your system specs and the battery that came with your laptop.

 

I would also say MAC OSX, but installing on anything but a Apple Computer is hell.

 

not to mention illegal...

DOS uses more power than OSX I don't think so.

 

I have
RAM: 2 GB
CPU: AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-58
Hard Drive: 250GB
Video Card: (Onb-oard) NVIDIA nForce 560 rev. A2
Battery: 6 Cell Lithium-Ion

If it helps at all.
I was looking for a linux distro that was optimized for laptop battery life but didn't find any, maybe Vista or XP are just as good as any OS...

 

Not including OSX (which would be illegal to install on your machine) or extremely old OS's (which would be hell to find drivers for), your best bet would probably be 2003 or XP. If you plan on upgrading to 4GB, I'd get 2003, otherwise XP will be just fine.

 

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. And follow those guides here to make XP even more battery friendly.

 

wolvix (linux distro) is good too

 

osx is based on the nextstep distro, so you may find a legal way around installing that...

I had vista on this laptop. 2 hours max battery life, xp sp2 gave me close on three, and depending on which distro of linux, i can get between 3 hours and 3 1/2 hours

 

I get about 2 hours with Vista but I'm going to test out XP and see if I get any more time.

Any recommendations on linux distros?
I'm leaning towards ubuntu or a ubuntu based OS. I like Kubuntu (KDE fan ) but would Gnome or Xfce use less resources and therefore offer longer battery life?

 

This is something that's kinda bugging me...Vista gets me 6 hours (assuming I'm just surfing the net and listening to music...playing games reduces it to 3-4 hours)...but linux mint only gets me 3 and a half hours at best. I wonder if there's some way to make it better at managing power...

Probably some kernel options for that, I guess.

 

More than that, there's a whole website dedicated to the topic. At least Linux on Intel HW.

 

command line of a distro would help, something like ubuntu server

 

any distro's server install would work there, depending on which package arrangement you prefer...ie rpm, deb or wether you want a particular manager available..

 

From my experiences with Linux (mainly Ubuntu), I found that battery life was comparable to XP... however, I never found a (simple) way of undervolting the CPU in Linux... and undervolting the CPU does help give ~20-30 mins more battery life if done correctly.

I think running XP and using an undervolting program would give the best results.

 

This is a little OT but, in Linux my battery seems to charge way faster.
That's weird.

 

Very weird - that should be BIOS controlled I thought...

~ Brett

 

Bios is only used for initial boot...
Once linux gets the basic information about location of drive, then it boots...
once booting the kernel, linux doesnt refer to the bios anymore...
thats why you can access harddrive information correctly yet leave the windows settings for harddrive access, alone...
(bios h/d for win cyl 1024 or less, sec ? , heads ?, where physically they are heads 16, sec ? cyl = well above 1024)

so the bios would have no effect upon the settings of what linux has set...
To improve battery life, you may want research cpu control, h/d saving and so forth...

for cpu, you may consider researching power savings whilst idle...
( i have not looked at this side of things as i really need more than the 2 cores i have now, but have brushed against this subject while trying to optimize applications)

 

I'm talking about charging the battery, not discharging it - i.e. the ability to charge it without the computer being on...

~ Brett

 

Vista has great battery life; Linux not so much. i average 5:30 with wifi on with Vista, 4:30 with linux (ubuntu and F8)