How much more battery life will Windows 7 provide?

I have a Thinkpad X200 ultraportable running Vista business x32 with Sp1. With all other things being the same except the OS, how much more battery life would Windows 7 give me?

 

I think like a 5% increase maybe.

 

Thats all?

I was expecting much more.

 

Im not really sure but ive gotten about 25 mins more on win7 than vista. But it depends on what your doing.Ive never owned a thinkpad so I can tell how much you might see plus my battery is old so it wont last since the cells in it are dying.So the max capacity is low.

 

From an O.S?

 

Sure. I thought there would be batter power management plans that would do things like undervolting the CPU automatically and run the Wifi at a lower power level when not transmitting or receiving data etc.

 

Win7 already does that, i also reccomend getting a 9 or 12 cell battery.

 

Oh, ok. I already have a 9 cell. So overall it seems that Win 7 will give me a little better battery life than Vista but not by a huge amount?

 

I wouldn't be surprised if it's only like a 5% increase. The OS can only manage the power usage so well.

 

Not much, it probably still uses many battery and power functions from Vista. Nothing in their "advantages" mentions anything about battery management improvement.

cheers ...

 

Vista is a huge improvement over XP for battery life. And Microsoft wants to compete in the netbook market, so I'm sure there's some power saving measure improvements over Vista. I can't imagine a whole heck of a lot, but it may do a better job with switching hardware on/off automatically, like integrated camera, wi-fi, bluetooth, etc.

 

Right, exactly. That is what I was thinking and that is why I started this thread.

 

Win7 is in the backend about the same as vista. same driver model, etc. so there can't be any massive powersaving changes. it should still be better, as they tweaked here and there, but nothing massive. that would require (another) rewrite after vista (and another case of no-drivers-at-launch-lets-blame-the-os-fiasko).

 

I've seen a couple "tests" published online that compared battery performance in W7 & Vista. IIRC, findings ranged from essentially no difference to negligible improvement in 7.

This isn't a flame. I pre-ordered the 7 pro upgrade earlier this month because I think there really is value-added with Windows 7. But a substantial leap forward in power management isn't part of it.

$.02

 

There is only so much an OS can do. A lot of the power management has to do with the hardware, specifically the chipset and the BIOS.

 

Exactly what I said.

 

Or get a pack of 2 batteries for a total of 20-cell, like mine
10 hours of battery life on a 17'' is pretty sweet.

 

but probably heavy

 

Yeah well, you can't get the best of both worlds.

 

On my SXPS, I would get about 3 hours on Vista... I just recorded 3:40 on Win7. Major thing for me is while on battery, the hard drive does not load anything at all on Win7 whereas on Vista, the hard drive was constantly spinning for no apparent reason.

 

It definitely is the hardware that determines how "fast" the battery drain is. A faster processor will chew up more power faster, as does a hard-drive spinner. If you are looking to optimize battery life, it'll have to be in the following areas:

• Processor Speed/Efficiency
• Hard Drive: the faster it spins, the faster the drain is.
• SSD's are the wave of the future. Battery life increases quite a bit if you have one of these.
• Heat: The hotter it is, the greater the battery drain.
• Graphics Chipset: Integrated gives better battery life, at the cost of processing power.
• Screen Type: LED saves a ton of battery life. In choosing your next laptop, opt for that LED backlit. OLED is even better, but it's quite expensive still.
• WiFi: This is also a killer in battery life. Chips with bluetooth support drain it even faster. Keep the bluetooth part shut-off when you can.

Vista and Windows 7 both provide a huge array of options in optimizing battery usage, but setting it up requires a lot of trial and error. I like how in Vista you could simply right click the battery icon and switch from 'Performance' to 'Battery Saver' in a flash.

 

Well, I suppose this would be categorized in terms of processor speed/efficiency, but it's mainly the wattage it draws. Ps at 25W vs. Ts at 75W or something like that.