I've heard Windows 7 makes some substantial battery life improvements over Vista. Has anyone tried 7 and can comment on whether or not this is true? I was considering leaving my PowerBook as my main OSX machine and experimenting with Windows 7 on my Air.
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Battery life on Windows 7... anyone tried it?
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I've noticed only about a 10-15% improvement in battery life compared to Vista. Windows battery life is pretty terrible on Apple machines. This article here has the numbers. Multiply by 10-15% for what you should expect under Windows 7. OSX simply has much better power management and sleep drain than Windows.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13
I have not noticed a 15% battery life increase, but I got much better battery life in Vista and Windows 7 than I did in OSX. Now, Windows 7 is the only OS I have on the MBA and I probably get ~3 hours of use (with wifi and bluetooth).
Power management is largely a driver issue. Apple needs to do a better job w/ a lot of the boot camp driver issues to help w/ the management on mac machines.
I wouldn't call it a substantial improvement.
Also, just remember, the first 24 hours are not a good time to benchmark battery run time since the OS is creating an index of the HD.
I do think there is more that can be done with the BootCamp drivers to take advantage of powermanagement features. For example, in windows, the LCD planel doesnt Dim after a time period like it does in OSx
Also, just remember, the first 24 hours are not a good time to benchmark battery run time since the OS is creating an index of the HD.
I do think there is more that can be done with the BootCamp drivers to take advantage of powermanagement features. For example, in windows, the LCD planel doesnt Dim after a time period like it does in OSx
I would say the 64-bit edition is slightly slower than 32-bit version. I would put 64-bit on desktop while laptops with C2D should go 32-bit as it is faster for all benchmarks besides not having more than 2GBs, whats the point of 64-bits ?. And it is slower on this processor too!.