Windows 7 to Extend Laptop Battery Life by Minimum of 11%
In the growing pile of reasons why Windows 7 will be a thousand times better than Vista, Microsoft has reported internal power specifications in which they tested an identical laptop playing back DVDs to battery failure. All things equal, the Vista configuration pulled 17.9W of power, while the Windows 7 machine pulled just 13.4W. It might not sound like much, but that’s a big deal.
jkOnTheRun reasons that if in Microsoft’s scenario the battery had 52 Watt/hours of power, the Vista system would run 3.05 hours. The same system running Windows 7 would run for 4 hours. And that makes sense, given that Microsoft was able to playback DVDs up to an hour longer on Windows 7 systems.
Microsoft tested a multitude of machines and found that while not everyone will gain an hour of battery life, every Windows 7 user coming from Vista would gain a healthy 11% minimum. [Viddler via jkOnTheRun]
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This post is most likely misleading. I bet they were just doing something stupid in the first place- such as spinning up the DVD drive most of the time or too often. Probably any decent DVD playing software would aggressively pre-read the DVD and buffer the contents in memory.
That Windows Media Player (I’m assuming that’s what they used) didn’t do this in the first place is not something Microsoft should get credit for. I’m sure most/all decent third party DVD playing software already did this trivial optimization.
This is typical Microsoft propaganda. Pick something which they fucked up the first time, fix and then quantify the performance as though it was across the board, when it most likely is not. I’ll give you another example: when Vista shipped (and for some time thereafter) the built in unzipper was ridiculously slow- like more than 5 times slower than Winzip or any other unzipping software. I’m sure they addressed this eventually, but they shouldn’t be getting credit for fixing shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place!