Effective battery life programs

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13

OS X is beating the snot out of Windows Vista lol. I'm using RM Clock but never thought about comparing battery life against Vista w/ pre-RM Clock. Has anyone tested any other programs for Vista that can improve it's battery life? I hope Windows 7 can give us the OS that Vista was supposed to be.

 

Superior battery life in OS X over Vista shouldn't be "unexpected" when you consider that Vista is designed for a much bigger hardware base; thus power management is much less refined and difficult to deliver across a large variety of devices. OS X has it easy simply because the OS is designed for a much smaller variety of hardware, namely Apple computers. In contrast, Microsoft has to contend with every piece of computer hardware under the sun.

 

Hmm. That is a good point. I would think that using similar base hardware (ie. a comparable notebook w/ the same specifications of a MBP), there should be a way to optimize battery life. If you don't use all the extraneous hardware, you should be able to improve the battery life beyond only half the time compared to OS X.

 

What would be a fair comparison to Apple's business decision to specify the hardware that can be used (then write the OS for that hardware) would be to allow Microsoft to do the same thing; specify the hardware, then write your OS for that narrow spectrum of hardware.

Ultimately the test results in the link you provided are not because of Apple's technological brilliance; it is simply because of Apple's business decision to confine OS X to proprietary hardware. Why, one might ask? Because Apple doesn't want OS X to compete directly with Windows.