More Windows 7 Battery Test Results Roll In...

[mkrishnan]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/12/windows-7-bested-by-xp-in-netbook-battery-life-tests/

Engadget reported on Thursday about three different sets of tests which found substantial reductions in netbook battery life (including on netbooks that shipped with Win7) using Windows 7 instead of XP, even when all the Aero features are turned off.

The venerable 2001 classic of an OS, Windows XP, strikes again. The scribes over at Laptop have put together a rather damning battery life comparison between old greybeard and the fresh Windows 7, which finds that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life with the upgraded software. In the case of the ASUS 1008HA, that deficit was a meaty 57 minutes, or 16.7%. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Adding these data to an earlier comparison with Snow Leopard, where Windows 7 was again markedly worse than its competitor, leads us to the conclusion that perhaps Microsoft's 7th heaven hasn't quite been optimized for the mobile mavens out there... yet.

Interestingly the conclusion is similar for the Asus computer that was shipped with Win7 and the MBP that doesn't yet have official Win7 bootcamp drivers.

 

[flopticalcube]

Interesting. On my 1008ha I find the deficit to be marginal at best. I use AeroFoil to turn off Aero on battery and I optimize CPU through SHE 2.09. I also disable the webcam on battery. I find Windows 7 to be about 10-15 minutes less (on about 5hrs 30min total) than XP which is well worth the price to me.

 

[mkrishnan]

I find Windows 7 to be about 10-15 minutes less than XP which is well worth the price to me.

Yeah, it seems to me with all the tuning and efficiency options it ought to be able to do even better, but if I had one of the 11-hour netbooks, I'd live with losing 15-20 minutes....

 

[thejadedmonkey]

To be honest, I don't even notice. My 3 hour battery life on my netbook is still better then the 1.5 hours that XP gives me in bootcamp.

 

[mkrishnan]

To be honest, I don't even notice. My 3 hour battery life on my netbook is still better then the 1.5 hours that XP gives me in bootcamp.

You have an MBP that gets 1.5 hours of battery life?

It makes a difference to me for two reasons -- first, for watching video on trips by air, where every moment of extra battery power counts, and second, because modern notebooks just don't conserve power while sleeping as well as they used to (although with non-SSD netbooks, hibernation is an option).