Windows Drains MacBook's Battery; Who's To Blame? 396
ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
No matter how bloated Windows is, battery life is only a function of ACPI drivers --- bootcamp's fault
HOW (Score:5, Informative)
Can you expect "power savings" when VMware is running? You are basically running two computers at once.
Re:fp (Score:3, Informative)
This is /. ain't no ladies round here.
Re:Not specifically MacBook/Windows/BootCamp probl (Score:5, Informative)
I write driver level embedded code for a living. Everything from bootstrapping embedded linux to SoC level power management.
Power management is usually the last thing to get done (if at all)... why? Because management usually sees it as icing on the cake. Attitudes are typically just make it work and we'll ship a bigger battery to make it last. Or we'll ship an upgrade in 6 months, if the product starts to take off and we decide to fund further development.
Time to market is everything.
Power management is also really hard to get right 100% of the time. It's really hard to debug code/hardware where stuff is shutting itself off, or worse, a controller uP is shutting you off unexpectedly.
It has NOTHING to do with 'bad code' or 'shitty programmers'. It's just management grinding down on the engineers to do it: better, faster, cheaper, pick two. Usually faster and cheaper win.
Nvidia has the Answer Right here. (Score:3, Informative)
Godwinning! (Score:1, Informative)
To each their own.
That's what he said. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Don't use bootcamp, but I use Fusion (Score:3, Informative)
>>>going from 4.5 hours of battery life on OS X on a MBP to 2 hours on any other OS is a little extreme!
Agreed. I've been using Microsoft products off-and-on for the last 25 years... ...and they haven't made a superior product since BASIC 7.0 on my C=128. The Windows 1-to-3 releases were jokes, Win95 was decent but still inferior to the Amiga or Mac OSes, and the new Vista 6.1 (Win7) is a giant blob of amorphous code that refuses to run properly even with 1.5 gigs of RAM in my brother's computer. Even though my XP machine only has 1/3rd as much memory, it still runs faster.
Windows Vista 6.1 still needs some major rewriting for efficiency. Maybe by the time we get to NT 7.0 these issues will finally be resolved.
Re:Don't use bootcamp, but I use Fusion (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not just Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Doubt it's the "bloated codebase" (Score:4, Informative)
LOL... You gave the standard answer, even briefly mentioning Dell. Macs are still way more expensive though.
That's because Macs don't use the POS Intel graphics chips.
Re:Not just Windows (Score:5, Informative)
That is correct (Score:3, Informative)
To do something like that, it must be supported by the drivers. As an example a coworker got a new Thinkpad with that feature, may have been the same one you got not sure. The switching works fine in XP. However he wanted to run the Windows 7 RC on it. There, we couldn't get it to work, I had to go in to the BIOS and shut down the Intel card. Why? No Windows 7 drivers for it. In fact at the time, Lenovo had no 7 drivers at all. All drivers had to be obtained from manufacturers of the various parts.
Any feature like this that deals with hardware must be supported in drivers. That is the responsibility of the OEM that puts the computer together. They don't necessarily write the drivers, but they work with the companies that make the hardware to get drivers for the OSes they wish to support. If Apple elects not to release drivers for Windows that support that, well then it won't work.
Re:Not just Windows (Score:1, Informative)
>Windows and Linux cannot switch to the integrated graphics card, explaining some reduced battery life.
Clearly an Apple issue, though. Vista/7 have the capabilities to switch between integrated GPUs on other machines without even logging out. You click a button, the screen flickers once or twice, and voila: new GPU.
Re:Apple tactics (Score:1, Informative)
Yes.
In fact, Windows handles the switch better than OSX.
OSX requires you to log out to change GPUs. One or two early Windows machines running Intel GPUs required a reboot, but current generation laptops with multiple GPUs don't even require you to log out so long as you're running Vista or better. You click a button, your screen flickers, and you're in the new GPU.
Re:Doubt it's the "bloated codebase" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who's to blame? (Score:3, Informative)
Yep.....
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification.ars [arstechnica.com]
Re:Windows 7 isn't even out yet (Score:3, Informative)
Why not?
I, for one, have a Mac and a technet subscription - the only reason I don't have the RTM downloading right now is because I've only just signed up and am waiting for my account to be processed.
ANYONE is free to get a technet subscription and get access to any and all microsoft products (for time-unlimited "evaluation" on unlimited machines for personal use) for about the same price as a copy of Windows ultimate.
If you're a geek (i.e., the type of person to run bootcamp) and want a copy of Windows RTM now, its "generally available" so long as you have broadband and about 300-400 bucks.
Re:Windows 7 isn't even out yet (Score:3, Informative)
> Someone subscribed to TechNet or MSDN is not going to be running Windows 7 on a Mac.
Actually, I think you're 180 degrees wrong. If you're switching to the Mac for the hardware only, you're specifically running Windows, it's quite likely you're a Windows developer. There is MS Office Mac for business users, and creative people discover the Mac tools and never go back, and Web-oriented people get the real HTML 5 Web out-of-the-box on Mac OS, but if you program in C Sharp and .NET then you have to run Windows and Microsoft's tools. You can switch to Mac but you're keeping Windows.
I've heard from a few different developer types that they were at conferences and they'd be at a table with 10 developer nerds and 10 MacBook Pros, but if you go around and look it was actually like 4 Mac OS, 2 Linux, and 4 XP. I heard from at least one Windows developer that he switched to Mac hardware so he could reboot in Mac OS X and make iPhone/iPod apps in addition to booting into Windows to make Win32 apps as before. He can't be the only guy who had that idea, it is a great one. And there is a blog called .NET Addict that has a Mac Pro grille in the masthead, the guy is using MacBook Pro and Mac Pro to do his MSDN programming and not only loving it, but sharing that far and wide.
A key thing is that Apple has 90% market share in $1000+ PC's, they have taken the high-end PC market in the same way they took the music player market with iPod. Developers typically want high-end hardware because they're going to use it everyday and they want compiles to be fast and because they want to focus while they're working on the code they're writing, not troubleshooting their workstation (even if they have those skills.) And installing Windows from scratch is actually a feature for developers, they can install it all exactly how they want.