Battery life of Vista vs XP on laptop ?

Hmm..

I just learned a neat trick from reading the laptop's manual ;) which I will share with you :)

"Windows Key" + E = brings up window explorer ! NEAT ;)

Also:

shift+windows key+m makes minimize all undone ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

This will help, my Dell I9300 when't from four hours to 6 hours per charge.

donald

Interesting. I wonder how one can find out whether or not CPU clock speed changes are supported on a certain machine. The "manuals" that come with them these days barely go past "Do not stick this into your mouth".

I hate explorer. I have a separate icon for every drive that I have access to, so I can see everything and drag/drop.

John

Given everyone (myself included) have complained about the excess resources (in particular CPU) that vista uses, it is likely it will use more power.

Given all the special visual effects they will use more power from your graphics chipset.

My own laptop has two chipsets - Nvida and Intel. The Nvida uses more power, but is quicker. A switch can select one or the other.

The possible flaw in my argument will be if the drivers for power management exist for Vista, but not XP, or if the drivers for XP are less well refined.

I personally use Solaris x86 on my laptop now. Despite spending over £1600 ($3200) on a laptop which came with Vista Business, I've now resorted to a free operating system. Vista was too slow, with 2 GB RAM and dual core 2.0 GHz.

Dave

Bah! The File Manager will eat you now! >:-D

And then you'll be sent straight to DOSS HELL!

Ah yes, DOS Shell, that was always intentionally misread... ;-)

Tim

What do the power management drivers do ?

So what are you hinting at ?

The laptop I am taking care of it... has some eTechnology...

like emporing stuff... I am not sure if it's really necessary for windows...

It seems some reporting stuff.. but the manual also mentioned some configuring stuff...

So I am not sure if this e-stuff is to be considered drivers as welll I'l have to look into that tomorrow.

I am guessing it's probably redundant stuff and is not really necessary. (acer specific stuff me thinks ;)

Yeah this is the song lol:

BYE VISTA LOL.

Bye, Skybuck ;)

Drivers will decide when the disk has not been used much and so it can save power by spinning it down. They will determine when you are not using much CPU and so reduce the clock speed. They might dim the screen a bit more on battery than they do on mains. There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce power. If intelligent drives exist for Vista, but not XP, then XP's power consumption could be higher than Vista. But assuming the drivers have similar performance for each, then I would expect Vista to run batteries down quicker.

I also noticed how installing the graphics driver improved the web-performance a lot.

So I also installed the graphics drivers onto my Pentium 3 which I completely forgot to do ;)

So it's probably a bit faster now.

Today the new case will probably arrive so I can start re-building my Dream Pc ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

Hello,

Today I shall report on my experience with Norton Ghost which I played with yesterday on the laptop. Here is what happened:

1. The vista installation had two paritions of each 60 GB.

These were backed up to two different files.

1. The disk was then formatted into one parition and windows xp pro was installed on it.

1. The xp installation was then backed up to one file.

2. Then I tried to restore the vista installation directly to the drive.

It only restored on drive... the c drive, it did not automatically restore the d drive.

The result was a mismatch in parition sizes compared to the original.

The vista drive was now 120 GB instead of the original 60 GB... so that's bad !.

1. Then I tried to restore vista by booting to the cd myself.

1. This time I selected both drives.

The tool started restoring but then half way it stopped with an error it could not read/write the sector... probably for drive d which didn't exist.

So I figured it's a partion size/layout issue.

1. Unfortunately the tool has a very crude partition table tool... I didn't know how to make two partitions of 60 GB... I could only delete a partition which didn't help.

The tool is apperently unable to make the necessary partition sizes itself.

This is a very big shortcoming in Norton Ghost 14.

1. I also tried the command prompt but FDISK was missing... I could not find any other tool to partition with.

1. I hoped windows xp setup disk might be of help. It has partitioning during the setup... I didn't know what would happen if I cancelled the installation after partitioning it. Was it just a setup up or did it do it ?

Fortunately for me... windows xp's setup cd does do the paritioning even if the install is cancelled.

Hoorah for that !

1. So finally I made two paritions myself each of 60 GB.

1. Then I restored both vista disks... and low and behold it worked.

The tool is pretty simple... but this partitioning thingy makes it bad for newbs ;)

Anyway...

It has some other interesting capabilities like:

Turning a backup file into a virtual disk... Gonna try mounting such a virtual disk later when my Dream PC is back online ;)

Using an external usb harddisk to store/restore backups was quite easy.... no dvd/cd swapping necessary which is nice... I could just walk up and take a nap ;) :)

I got dizzy from the napping though I think but anyway :)

Having to switch hundreds of dvd's sound horrible... oh well.

But the usb harddisk has a little disadventage too..

It requires extra power adapters... and thus extra power wall sockets or extension cords/devices ! ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

Also:

The laptop was busy doing something.

I plugged the power cable into the power socket.

But I did not know the power extension box was not attached to the wall socket.

So the laptop started working with it's battery.

After only two hours or so xp said: better plug in or you might start losing work or something like that...

I was like: "wow ? It was fully charge... is it already running low ?!?"

Wow such crap ! Glad I don't have a laptop for main work.

Anyway I also noticed the hd is a bit slow in it's response not sure why that is...

That kinda annoyed me a bit ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

For a laptop "doing something" two hours is a pretty typical battery life.

Plenty of people use laptops for their "main work" -- they just keep them plugged in. :-)

Also yesterday I played BF2 Demo on the laptop under vista...

The laptop got hot after a while.

It was able to play BF2 at all high... it played pretty well... except when I flew near the carrier.. then it started to slow down... probably because of too few pixel shaders etc.

Then I had to stop, laptop was getting to hot me thinks.

Also the sound made the laptop keys shake a bit... unpleasant.

Also I worry about dangerous radiation from wireless stuff.

Now vista has been replaced with xp backup once again ;) :)

So no more vista from now on...

Tomorrow... actually today the laptop will probably go back to it's owner ;) :)

It was fun and interesting... but I am glad when it's out of my house.

Only thing I still wanna do is change some colors of my own software so it looks better on Vista... but I can probably do that with a virtual disk image of it.

Which I still gotta make and transfer to my computer.

Right now it's transferring a xp image... just in case I need/want that too ;) :)

Nice and clean.. oh yeah that reminds of a little dll replacement experiment I want to do with my own pc/p3.

I also ordered 4 pin extension for dream pc... at pcsilent or something... those boys pretty fast as well.. cable will probably arrive today or tomorrow... nice !

Fingers crossed with all other cable lengths ;)

I also probably didn't need splitters... since fan mulox things can be extended by itself.

Bye, Skybuck =D

So does the CPU in a desktop PC -- you're just a lot further away from it.

Most BIOSes let you set a maximum CPU temperature -- temperatures exceeding it can the CPU to be throttled so that it can cool down.

You should worry about 1000x as much as radiation from the sun and driving an automobile.

Mine sits in a docking station, connected to a 24" monitor. ;-)