Upgrading 7 or downgrading to XP for better battery life ?

I have a Samsung X360 with Vista Businessand would like to know how much battery life would be affected if I downgrade to XP or upgrade to 7.

If battery life would be the same, I prefer XP since it takes less space on my 128 SSD and takes less RAM

 

XP may utilize less memory, but it's because it delivers less features and generally trades memory utilization for more I/O. Hitting the hard disk is more expensive energy-wise than retrieving the same data from RAM. Reduced RAM usage also doesn't imply increased battery life; the physical modules are either on or off, depending whether the system is on or off. AFAIK, Windows 7 with the default, initial install, consumes less disk space than Vista did.

 

Vista and Windows 7, if configured correctly, get better battery life than XP because of much increased battery and power management.

 

How to configure Vista for optimal battery life ?

 

A first stop ould be changing the power profile to battey saver, possibly changing a few additional options - these can vary from laptop to laptop, things like shutting of the CD/DVD drive (I can) and LAN for example.

 

I'd suggest taking a look at the Undervolting Guide and undervolting your laptop with RMClock as well - power draw has a quadratic relation to voltage, so undervolting can give a significant battery life increase. It will work with Windows 2000? or later (XP if not 2K), but if you're running Vista 64-bit (this probably will apply to 7 as well), be sure to check the end of the first post to get the 64-bit signed driver.

 

Yes, switching your power plan to Battery Saver is a good start. From there, I would go to the advanced power settings to change some things manually. For instance, you can choose how long before the screen turns off, HDD turns off, screen brightness, processor speed, etc. Most settings I don't change, but a few I do.

Basically, as long as you're using the Battery Saver plan you should be fine.

First I would suggest adjusting your plan settings, but if after that you're still not satisfied with battery life, then I would suggest undervolting.

 

battery life is more affected by the USER and their computing patterns rather than the OS.

As far as buying a specific laptop and then doing things like underclocking and undervolting, it would probably be easier (more reliable too??) to buy a lesser-powered laptop in the first place with the biggest battery you can fit on to it.

 

Windows 7 gets much better battery life than XP.

With XP, my old Dell Inspiron 1501 got an hour and thirty minutes as a battery lifetime. For Windows 7, it was 2:30.

 

First of all, RAM usage has nothing to do with battery life, you RAM uses the same amount of power weather it's empty or max capacity.

Secondly, Vista/Win7 Aero engine uses the GPU (rather than the CPU like previous version of Windows) to render the interface. If you have a recent video card, it should handel Aero without any worry, but if your system is old the GPU may be struggling to draw the interface, which result in having teh GPU under load all the time and kill your battery life.

Third, because Vista/Win7 memory management is now something to be considered very good compared to the XP abysmal one, you should gain battery life. In XP, no mater how much RAM you have, the OS always act if you are low in memory and puts everything on the page file that it can. This is the reason why XP uses MUCH less memory over Vista/Win7 (without superfetch). In Vista/Win7, the page file is barely used, so in result your HDD in XP is more used, which diminishes your battery life.

Technology like prefetch and superfetesh, auto boot optimization, allows you to potentially gain battery life, by having a system that boot quicker for what it is (remember that Vista/Win7 has a lot more feature than XP), and pre-loads application before you do on memory (it has a very good learning system), resulting in a faster startup of your application. Let's say you use Firefox all day. If you run it, and this time you close it , and later open it, the HDD utilization will be used less, as windows kept it loaded in your memory.

Windows 7 has dim light system, where when you don't use your laptop (idle) for a defined time the screen dims to minimum and comes back when you move your mouse of type. Small things, but anything helps.

So, yes Windows 7 is a lot bigger than XP in all aspects but it has many systems put in place to compensate the loss so that the battery life is about the same or even a little lower than with XP (presuming you have a adequate system, with official, optimized, drivers). However, it must be noted that it depends on how your use your system as well.

 

I implemented a lot of the ideas of the Vista Tweak guide and have my X360 running at around 2 Watts less...

 

. Use power "balance" mode

. Stick with Vista

cheers ...