Nick White, from Microsoft, joins the discussion about battery life under Vista.
Some people have been arguing that the decrease in battery performance that some are seeing with Vista (my Toshiba M400 has become noticeably battery unfriendly, for instance) is due to Aero. Nick says that the Aero features actually consume "only about 1-4% more of battery life." For a battery that previously lasted 200 minutes, that would yield a loss of 2-8 minutes due to Aero which would be acceptable--and I'd add, probably not noticeable.
I'm not sure if Nick is saying that the whole Vista Aero system consumes 1-4% more battery life or that if Aero is disabled in the OS by the user that you'll only see the 1-4% difference. I'm guessing he's saying the latter. This doesn't mean that the core Aero system itself doesn't consume 10+% more battery life--even when it's not composing anything on the display using Aero technology.
The problem is that many people are noticing significant battery drops on some machines--although not all. My Samsung Q1 (which has a 915 chipset and therefore doesn't run Aero and the sidebar is turned off)--runs Vista just fine. Others are seeing that their UMPCs are doing just fine too.
Could it be that the UMPCs run just fine because they have a 915 chipset which has drivers that were not optimized for Vista? More speculation.
I'd like to hear someone from Intel or Microsoft break down the battery issue further. If there's no hope, just tell us there's no hope. I'll pick up a new Tablet if that's what I have to do to get acceptable battery life. I just want to know that the next Tablet I get can last a couple hour flight. In the meantime, I've been moving much of my critical travel software to my UMPC. Sorry Tablet, you'll be travelling no farther than the end of your power cord from now on.



Incremental Blogger