Vista vs XP Battery Life

My experience with Vista on an SZ330 with dual boot to XP was a reduction in battery life from 3:15 to 2:05 in the Speed mode doing lite web surfing with wireless on and bluetooth off. Time is measured to the 90% warning. I did not have Smart Wi running.

I have seen some posts reporting similar results and others reporting 3 hour battery life with Vista in the Stamina mode. With heavy web surfing I get about 3:45 with stamina in XP.

Could others please post their results, especially where a comparison with XP was made using similar loads. Any tricks or tips to extend battery life under Vista would be appreciated.

 

Maybe it's just me but I actually get the same or slightless less time in Vista but not as big of a difference as you.

Stamina w/power saving (brightness at 3, intel speedstep, etc)
XP - 3:30hrs
Vista - 3:15hrs

Speed w/power saving (brightness at 3, intel speedstep,etc)
XP - 2:45hrs
Vista - 2:30hrs

This is with WLAN on, BT off and with surfing the web, checking email, etc.

FYI...the screen brightness has the most impact on your battery life.

 

I get 45 mins less with vista. YAY!

 

that's easily resolved for me...I don't even have the correct nVidia drivers from Sony to make my Speed mode work =[.

 

I'm getting better results here. In stamina mode I get close to 4h (3:45-3:50) surfing the web over Wifi, having the screen dimmed to 3 and some devices (DVD, wired network, firewire) disabled and tweaked power saving settings. That is not much less than what I would get under XP, maybe 20min less.

In Speed mode I get much less, little more than 2h. Thats mainly because I cant dimn the screen yet. And full brightness kills the battery life.

 

I have the brightness set to the lowest and with WLAN on during my lectures. I could last about 3-4 hours

 

I got a new computer from Acer and sent it to them without opening the box to get Windows removed, (less then $50 refund - $10 shipping, = ~$35+).
I will use Ubuntu as the main OS and I have already a Virtual Machine with XP but I am thinking to install a small partition with Windows Native, just in case. I can get any Windows for free from my school, deciding between XP Pro or Vista Business.
I need to maximize the battery life.

I know that:
Vista by default consumes more battery than XP. A combination of:
* Heavy CPU usage
* Extra HDD usage
* Aero

With the times reported above (Mobilehavoc and Private-Cowboy) have you done any optimizing such as turning Aero off or disable the HDD search (windows desktop or whatever is that)? Or did you use the default installation?

The ACPI 3.0 in Vista is supposed to help but practice tells otherwise.

Thank you guys,

 

Ditch Vista. 10-25% less battery time.

 

Do you have a source for that? I'm getting a solid 2.5 hours out of my FZ, which isn't known to have great battery life.

 

The REAL issue is can you get the proper drivers and power management apps needed for XP on YOUR machine. Case in point, Sony ships the FX series machines with Vista. They provide drivers to downgrade to XP. But they do NOT provide the auxillary applications for XP. This means the function keys and POWER MANAGEMENT are not operable under XP. Therefore some folks who tried XP were unhappy with the battery performance on the FZ under XP.

Gary

 

Thanks for the replies guys.
ScuderiaConchiglia, I believe I can get the same power management utilities because although in US the laptop sells only with vista, in Europe it sells with both and I can get the drivers from the website over there.

What I would like to know though is how is the battery life with some basic optimization such as turning off the Windows Search Indexing(that what is called) and maybe Aero.
I understand that the crazy DRM stuff will use the CPU more and there is no way around that.

Anybody how has tried those can give some feedback, there is a general agreement that battery life will increase but no data. If turning off Aero will give me just 5 more minutes I would rather keep it.
The reasons that I am even considering Vista is the explorer (I hate the super basic explorer that XP has) and that I need to get used to it because of my job.

 

source was me using TXN with Vista and XP. I've compared it side by side, watching movies/playing audio/sitting idle/etc

 

My own tests (not on Sony notebooks) is that provided Vista's eye candy and indexing is turned off then the battery life will be at least as good as with XP.

John

 

what is the point of vista then? having a buggy/ugly OS that takes up twice as much space? ))

 

That HDD is a good point. I knew that it need more but not until I checked the details.
At this point I think I will go with XP.
I saw also this:
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/06/vista-aero-vs-battery-life-myth.html
so I am thinking the major power hog is the Windows Search Indexing.
To my knowledge it will query the HDD very very often looking for changed files.
If that is the case, it is just plain stupid and extremely inefficient. Other OSs like OS Leopard or Linux get the list of changes from the kernel.

Thank you guys.

 

also it will siphon every bit through its DRM nonsense to make sure you have rights to this bit.