2013 Macbook Air 13" Bootcamp Battery Life in Windows

I'm getting over 12 hours easily. Just browsing and work.

I'm not getting that good battery life. I would love to get maybe about 8-9 hours with Windows 8.1 on MBA 11" 2013, BUT, the reality is.....I only get a bit less that 6 hours. On Mavericks, I get over 10 hours.

Anyone maybe know how to get better battery life on boot camp? Is there a way to solve this? I can't find much info..some people report that they get amazing battery life with Win 8, so I really want that as well..Would love to permanently use this MBA with Windows.

Thanks.

There really isn't a way to increase battery life, besides lowering screen brightness and disabling unnecessary things (like WiFi when you're not using the internet).
Apple's drivers for Windows do not optimize battery life whatsoever. Running Windows 7 temporarily on a bootcamp partition on my MBA 13", I only got about 6 hours; running it in VMware, oddly enough, got me about 8 or 9.
I'm not saying VMware is better, just my experiences. Expecting the same battery life out of Windows on a Mac VS native OS X on a Mac is unreasonable, especially considering all the tweaks and optimizations Mavericks has to squeeze every drop of energy out of your battery.

nycesquire said:

How is that for keyword stuffing? I'm trying to get a sense of the battery life in windows bootcamp.

These guys are getting great battery life:

http://solidworksonamac.com/macbook-air ... dows-7-pr/

But I've also seen reports of people getting awful battery life.

What are your real-world experiences?

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DistantOrigin said:

There really isn't a way to increase battery life, besides lowering screen brightness and disabling unnecessary things (like WiFi when you're not using the internet).
Apple's drivers for Windows do not optimize battery life whatsoever. Running Windows 7 temporarily on a bootcamp partition on my MBA 13", I only got about 6 hours; running it in VMware, oddly enough, got me about 8 or 9.
I'm not saying VMware is better, just my experiences. Expecting the same battery life out of Windows on a Mac VS native OS X on a Mac is unreasonable, especially considering all the tweaks and optimizations Mavericks has to squeeze every drop of energy out of your battery.

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But I really don't understand why some people report that they have 8 - 12 hours battery life on win 8 or 8.1, while some report only about 6 hours. I'm the latter. Would love to get 8 to 9 hours of battery life on my mba 2013 with windows 8.1

sw6lee said:

But I really don't understand why some people report that they have 8 - 12 hours battery life on win 8 or 8.1, while some report only about 6 hours. I'm the latter. Would love to get 8 to 9 hours of battery life on my mba 2013 with windows 8.1

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If I had to wager I'd say it's because people have different energy saving configurations. I'm not sure how power saving settings work in Win 8.1, but I know you can really configure and alter the way the battery works in 7. Also widely depends on tasks being completed, of course.

I used mine for over 6 hours and still had 35% battery remaining.

I have a 13" MB Air 8gb/i7/512gb ssd

Pretty sure I would get 8+ hours

Detailed H/W and OS to tabulate battery life

Newtons Apple said:

I used mine for over 6 hours and still had 35% battery remaining.

I have a 13" MB Air 8gb/i7/512gb ssd

Pretty sure I would get 8+ hours

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Thanks Newtons for your feedback on this issue. What was the version of Windows you were running ? Win 7, Win 8 or Win 8.1 ? I presume you are running bootcamp ?

I guess most of the people commenting forget to add what H/W and what OS they are running to get the aforementioned battery life.

IMO, the amount of RAM, the processor, bootcamp or vmware/parallels, win version, will all make a difference in the results. If everyone contributes, we would be able to have a better discussion on this important issue.

JohnnyGo said:

Thanks Newtons for your feedback on this issue. What was the version of Windows you were running ? Win 7, Win 8 or Win 8.1 ? I presume you are running bootcamp ?

I guess most of the people commenting forget to add what H/W and what OS they are running to get the aforementioned battery life.

IMO, the amount of RAM, the processor, bootcamp or vmware/parallels, win version, will all make a difference in the results. If everyone contributes, we would be able to have a better discussion on this important issue.

Click to expand...

Windows 7 Pro.

Windows 8 is a horrible joke that is far from funny!

I'm getting around 9-10 hours with Windows 7, using default power settings and the "Balanced" profile. Battery life on Windows is worse than OSX, but it's certainly not horrible by any means.

So are you guys on Win 7 with 13inch MacBook airs 2013? I'm on Win8.1 pro with 11inch MacBook air 2013. I love the win8.1 metro interface, so I wish to keep this, but would like maybe about 8 hours battery life. 11 inch has shorter battery life than 13 inch, so if 13inch gets about 8 hours, then maybe what I'm getting is normal.. but if one of you guys are getting 9 to 10 hours on Win 7 pro, then maybe Win 7 is more battery efficient?

I got 7-8 *usable* hours on my Macbook Air 13 2013, 8GB, 512GB, i7, BootCamp, Windows 8. I also used PCIe power saving modes, enabled USB sleep, enabled core parking, and disabled unneeded services. It idles 2-3 watts from the wall and the same from the battery. My windows gaming laptop idles 6-7w so it aint bad.
The network services running in the background it was kills the battery life.

Usable = Web Browsing, playing music, on VPN (remoting into servers), streaming some youtube/twitch, downloading programs, playing with wine, some VM's (2-3) running, 1 hours skype call, charging my iphone for 45 minutes. and then some. (couldn't remember everything I did that day lol)

Anand has some comparisons of MBA osx vs win8 battery life in its surface 3 review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8077/microsoft-surface-pro-3-review/4