"Battery life of NC10 better under Vista"

I read on a dutch forum that someone gets better battery life after he switched to Vista.

He says; surfing, wifi on, bt off, brightness 3 stripes, aero glass on, superfetch and indexing on, over 7 hours.

Can someone confirm this?

I think it would mean with Aero off, superfetch and indexing off it's possible to get over 7.5 hours.

 

I would like to see that supported by some longer observations of power consumption. 7.5 hours would mean an average of just over 7W power drain.

My NC10 (with standard XP) just manages to get below 7.5W power drain using the Samsung Maximum Battery Life profile with no internet, wireless or Bluetooth and the display on minimum brightness. I've seen 7.01W when the display auto-dims with Mobilemeter and perfmon running. (See the attached - the blips in the perfmon graph are Mobilemeter updating every 6 seconds, so not much other work for the CPU). Any sort of activity will increase the power drain to 8W or more. An average power drain of 8W gives 7 hours operation on a full battery.

There are two possible ways that someone could see a lower power drain:

(i) Having a CPU with lower power drain than mine (the Intel specs just give maximum, not minimum, power drains).

(ii) Turning off hardware devices: I have tested this by disabling the webcam, Bluetooth, wireless and network hardware in Device Manager and the power drain went down to 6.74W. It is possible that Vista is better than XP at disabling unused devices.

John

 

I'm sceptical too, I'd like to see more reports before I install Vista myself.

By the way, the hard drive could also make a difference. I've seen mainly Fujitsu and Hitachi 5k320 reported. The 5K320 has better powersaving features accoring to Tomshardware.

 

And if Vista actually manages to power down the HDD when it is idle then that would save more power. However, I have never noticed the HDD powering down with either XP or Vista on other notebooks.

John

 

The second table on this page shows the low power requirements of the 5K320 320GB while idle. The 160GB should be even better.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-16.html

 

0.9W idle power is quite significant in the current discussion.

BTW, I was exploring the audio controls and noted that the power drain had dropped to nearer 6W. See the attached. This was without the display auto-dimming (down to 5.99W with auto-dimming working).

However, the process of capturing that screen and copying it over to my E6400 pushed the power drain up to over 7W and it hasn't gone down again, yet. Maybe the HDD had powered down?

John

 

Could you recommend a program for measuring wattage?

 

M obilemeter draws the nice graph that you can see on the right part of the above graphics. It doesn't work with Vista.

The battery info page of RMClock gives the battery details and power drain.

BatteryMon is another, but it demands money after 30 days.

John

 

Much appreciated.