Any chance of optimized drivers for windows on an MBP?

[schmintan]

So although 5-6 hours of battery is not uncommon for a MBP running OSX, when you get windows on there, it goes down to 90 mins.

Most people (inc me) believe this is not a failing of windows, but a result of poorly written drivers not utilizing the hardware correctly.

It doesnt look like apple will ever write decent drivers for their hardware for use with windows.

So, im wondering are there any projects to get decent drivers for apple hardware for use under windows? even if you didnt get the full 5-6 hours, it should still be easy enough to get 3-4 hours from a mac on windows.

 

[Bill Gates]

You can get battery life that's pretty darn close to OS X under Windows 7. The only component that's really a thorn as far as battery life is the graphics card, and since the Intel GPU isn't even exposed to the OS under Windows, there's no hope to solve that with any sort of driver fix. You'd have to modify the EFI. There's nothing substantive that can be done under Windows to improve battery life.

 

[schmintan]

You can get battery life that's pretty darn close to OS X under Windows 7. .

interesting. every discussion on this online agrees that its dodgy drivers. nice to hear someone disagrees with this. you have any stats/figures to confirm what the battery life is exactly under windows?

regarding the GPU, dont MBP's use G Force graphic cards, and not intel cards? And even if they did use intel GPU's, the Intel GPU in the mac is not anything you cant get in a standard windows laptop, so why wouldnt optimized drivers be available?

 

[Bill Gates]

interesting. every discussion on this online agrees that its dodgy drivers. nice to hear someone disagrees with this. you have any stats/figures to confirm what the battery life is exactly under windows?

regarding the GPU, dont MBP's use G Force graphic cards, and not intel cards? And even if they did use intel GPU's, the Intel GPU in the mac is not anything you cant get in a standard windows laptop, so why wouldnt optimized drivers be available?

I don't have any figures, only my own anecdotal evidence, but the issue is that the Intel GPU doesn't even "exist" under Windows. The newest MacBook Pro uses graphics switching similar to the Optimus technology that Windows laptops use. The Intel GPU is used most of the time, and when certain features are required in certain applications, the Nvidia GPU automatically takes over. IIRC, the Nvidia GPU has a 23W TDP vs 10W (I'm not sure of these figures) for the Intel GPU so it's definitely a hotter (and therefore hungrier) chip. Drivers are irrelevant in this case; the BIOS compatibility layer that Apple is using is at fault.