How Windows 7 shames Vista on battery life

by admin November 28, 2008 at 4:54 pm

Microsoft’s plans to prolong your notebook’s power

If a notebook runs Windows Vista, it will run Windows 7 and it will get better battery life, promises Gabriel Aul of the Windows Performance team. But PC manufacturers and device suppliers are also going to have to do their part to make a big difference to power consumption on new notebooks.

What Microsoft can do is make it easier for components in the system to go into low power mode when the system is idle. Some of that is ‘managing’ components: Windows 7 ‘parks’ CPU cores that aren’t needed, finally implements the ‘slumber’ feature on SATA drives, powers down USB ports and controllers more aggressively and even puts your Wi-Fi card to sleep if it’s turned on but not connected to a network.

Read more: techradar.com