Battery life on Vista Vs. XP

For those who have upgraded from XP to Vista, how did it impact your battery life?

I am thinking of upgrading my Dell XPS M1210 (Core Duo T2400/Go7400/1GB RAM, 12.1" WXGA) which gives me approx 3:00 hours with a 6 cell (53Whr) battery under normal usage (brightness 75%, wireless on and say, browsing the net)

NHC (Notebook hardware control) typically shows 15-18 W of power drain on the battery under such normal usage.....

Has anyone around measured the change on the power drain after a Vista upgrade?

Also, has anyone measured the difference in battery drain with Aero enabled/disabled?

 

in a nutshell, no noticeable difference, and i firmly believe that as time goes on with vista being matured, laptop battery life will be much better under vista than under xp

the best part within vista so far (for me) is that no longer do i need 3rd party software (such as NHC ....) to manage performance/power management

my 2 cents -(running full blast aero in my old beat.up emachines)

cheers ...

 

^^ But wouldn't the GPU utilization go up due to Aero?

AFAIK, the nVidia Go series switches to a lower clock speed during 2 D rendering (with Powermizer enabled) to save up battery power....

Anyone with a Go series GPU who may have measured the battery life in Vista?

 

Aero is bound to add a few watts to the power consumption.Specially Aero requires high quality textures to display the windows when the effects are applied to them (Rendering textures as big as 800x800 on high detail is surely a pain)

 

i m quite sure that running aero would add process cycles to the system/gpu, cannot say much about nvidia, but with ati offical vista driver et al, i hardly see (so far anyway) any shortening of battery life

it might be that m$ is getting something right with vista, but it is so new and the nuts&bolts are not still being understood. there is really no scientific yet as how to measure vista performance in battery lofe (& other areas) but personal experiences.

that is why i m weary to hear about negative (or positive) aspects on vista unless the user him/herself has been subjected to their own experiences and keeping an open mind about it. i still have my xp partition live and kicking, but for me, abeit from some app incompatibility & still getting used to the navigation, i spent much of my time under vista at the moment.

cheers ...

 

I thought that since the GPU offloads desktop rendering from the CPU, making windows snappier and equal or longer batterylife. In this test at Tom's Hardware Guide, they actually had a small increase of battery life wile running vista: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

 

oh well, I finally decided to give Vista a trial shot...
So I made a trial clean install, and surprisingly, and though I haven't yet been able to run a full dischaarge cycle, but surprisingly, the battery indicator on the system tray shows ~3:40 remaining at 99% battery (50% brightness, wireless on) compared to ~3:00 on XP

Really surprising, i was expecting it to be the other way round....Though I am definitely not complaining

 

You should see no difference in actual battery life. How long did it last?

 

same here, i'm getting around 3:30 on my acer aspire 5102. it looks like MS fixed the early power problems that plaqued beta2.

 

I am finding about %10 higher power use in Vista.

 

Battery life is my main sticking point w.r.t. XP/Vista. I might reinstall Vista the next time my XP acts up, and give it another spin.

 

for those who are concerned about vista aero using up extra juice...use a program called vista battery saver...which automatically disables aero and side bar upon battery use and enables it when plugged in..i noticed it gives me an extra half hour or so on a 7 cell batt

 

what i actually dont understand is why there is so many people that cares about their battery life but then they use vista with aero and max brightness heheh

Use it without aero and on low brightness and you will see how Vista battery life is WAY BETTER than on XP

 

It depends on how well the bios is optimized for vista. If it's unoptimized it will use more power than normal.