Force Windows to use Embedded video instead of discrete?

[RoskO]

Hopefully someone has run across how to do this. I have a newer unibody 17, looking to have windows use the embedded video card instead of the discrete for power reasons. I'm running windows 7 x64, everything runs great but the battery life is an hour or two less than OSX, and at least an hour of that is due to it not utilizing the embedded video.

Any help is appreciated.

-Jeremy

 

[RoskO]

Kinda stinks no one has a suggestion. I see people posting about battery life in windows being worse etc.....well this is a big part of the problem. It's not hard to figure out why battery life is worse, but it is hard to find solutions or drivers to support things like dual video cards.

I wish apple had included a nice video switcher with the boot camp drivers so you could control which video card the system is using, since they included that in OSX.

 

[ayeying]

You do realize there is no way for this to happen, thats why no one is posting a suggestion.

 

[RoskO]

I don't know why you'd say there is no way for this to happen...IBM lenovo T400s pull it off the same way apple/nvidia is doing it, using embedded vid to save power. It's not really that far fetched, just a driver update probably.

 

[Gav Mack]

I don't know why you'd say there is no way for this to happen...IBM lenovo T400s pull it off the same way apple/nvidia is doing it, using embedded vid to save power. It's not really that far fetched, just a driver update probably.

I agree it would be quite simple for Apple to create EFI utilities to enable both cards - that with AHCI SATA support and power management functions are also on my wish list. Only problem is Apple probably won't without a fight - they're hardly going to level the playing field giving Windows a boost when they use it as an stick to beat Microsoft with it's 'inferior' power management over a Mac.

 

[RoskO]

I agree. So far in my testing of windows 7 throughout the betas and now running RTM, the power management is within about 10% of OSX....definitely good enough for me in most cases. When the hardware manufacturer spends the time to write drivers and power plans, it usually ends up leveling the playing field.

Windows laptops from HP/Toshiba sometimes have just about the same power usage as apple laptops when they are configured properly. I guess I'm happy to have this monster battery, I still get 6hrs outta the 17" on win7, but OSX does a little better due to the use of the embedded (7-8hrs) if I milk it.

 

[Gav Mack]

I agree. So far in my testing of windows 7 throughout the betas and now running RTM, the power management is within about 10% of OSX....definitely good enough for me in most cases. When the hardware manufacturer spends the time to write drivers and power plans, it usually ends up leveling the playing field.

Windows laptops from HP/Toshiba sometimes have just about the same power usage as apple laptops when they are configured properly. I guess I'm happy to have this monster battery, I still get 6hrs outta the 17" on win7, but OSX does a little better due to the use of the embedded (7-8hrs) if I milk it.

It grates more when you've had to buy a second battery and for intensive video work on Windows having to reboot into OSX first for smcFanControl to rev the fans up - the 9600 GPU builds up far too much heat around the left hand speaker area sometimes causing windows to freeze solid.