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Getting absolutely TERRIBLE battery life in Vista on Unibody. But, OSX is just fine?

mattcube64

mattcube64

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 21, 2006
1,297
115
Missouri
I have a late-2008 unibody MBP. And, in OSX, with the 9600 enabled, I can easily get three hours or so with moderate settings, even when playing some games, or downloading stuff. With the 9400? Even more!

But, in Vista, I can barely get an hour of life from the same battery. With "balanced" settings, and just browsing, I get about 70 minutes or so. With "high performance" and playing some TF2, I get only about 45 minutes. What's the deal?!

Any suggestions?
Thanks!
 
mattcube64 said:
I have a late-2008 unibody MBP. And, in OSX, with the 9600 enabled, I can easily get three hours or so with moderate settings, even when playing some games, or downloading stuff. With the 9400? Even more!

But, in Vista, I can barely get an hour of life from the same battery. With "balanced" settings, and just browsing, I get about 70 minutes or so. With "high performance" and playing some TF2, I get only about 45 minutes. What's the deal?!

Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Click to expand...

Piss-poor power management in Vista?
 
A lot of things. Not a lot of optimization on the Windows side so don't expect long battery life. I don't get no more than 2 hours of battery life even with light usage.
 
Windows has poor power management. It's a miracle Windows even gets 2 hours of battery life. Also, take into account the fact that Vista/7 uses your graphics card every time (Windows Aero) so that also takes a toll on your battery. Microsoft should learn how to make nice Aero lighter on the battery.
 
Hmm thats weird.

I'm getting 4:30 doing the things I do on OSX w 9400m. And getting the same 4:30 on Windows XP 32bit doing the same things with nothing changed except for the 9600 running (I might add, because of this, it gets damn hot on the xp os).

Must be shizy vista.
 
dudeitsjay said:
Hmm thats weird.

I'm getting 4:30 doing the things I do on OSX w 9400m. And getting the same 4:30 on Windows XP 32bit doing the same things with nothing changed except for the 9600 running (I might add, because of this, it gets damn hot on the xp os).

Must be shizy vista.
Click to expand...

Well XP doesn't use Windows Aero interface that sucks down your battery.
 
I suggest checking out the free Windows 7 RC. It has a host of efficiency improvements that ought to bump up your battery life. Vista is rather inefficient. :/
 
Vertig0 said:
I suggest checking out the free Windows 7 RC. It has a host of efficiency improvements that ought to bump up your battery life. Vista is rather inefficient. :/
Click to expand...

I get the same battery life with 7 as I do with XP. I don't know how dudeitsjay can get maximum/optimal battery life with the 9600M GT in both Windows and OS X doing what he does while I get no more than 2 hours doing less intensive tasks. Reading various posts here, I think he's the only person do so unless he's using the new MacBook Pro's with the integrated battery (he never was clear on that).
 
People here may blame windows, but honestly a dell can get fine battery life with similar components. It's got to be apple's drivers they wrote for windows. They're not terribly good, as the comp runs very hot and battery life is poor. Also, a lot of crashes.
 
Freyqq said:
People here may blame windows, but honestly a dell can get fine battery life with similar components. It's got to be apple's drivers they wrote for windows. They're not terribly good, as the comp runs very hot and battery life is poor. Also, a lot of crashes.
Click to expand...

I still blame the operating system that gets hot, crashes a lot and has bad battery life on Dell notebooks.
 
thegoldenmackid said:
I still blame the operating system that gets hot, crashes a lot and has bad battery life on Dell notebooks.
Click to expand...

have you owned a dell laptop in the last 3 years running xp or vista? I have both apples and pcs and both have their share of problems and benefits. I'm not going to get into a debate over which is better, but dells can run cool and get good battery life too.
 
Freyqq said:
People here may blame windows, but honestly a dell can get fine battery life with similar components. It's got to be apple's drivers they wrote for windows. They're not terribly good, as the comp runs very hot and battery life is poor. Also, a lot of crashes.
Click to expand...

+1

Power management is a function of optimised drivers, for which Apple has yet to write/procure decent Windows ones for its hardware. Turning off unneeded services and visual trickeries should also help. Start with Aero as already suggested and lose the indexing which should cut down on the hard drive thrashing.
 
iLog.Genius said:
I get the same battery life with 7 as I do with XP. I don't know how dudeitsjay can get maximum/optimal battery life with the 9600M GT in both Windows and OS X doing what he does while I get no more than 2 hours doing less intensive tasks. Reading various posts here, I think he's the only person do so unless he's using the new MacBook Pro's with the integrated battery (he never was clear on that).
Click to expand...

Oh sorry, I just recently got the newest uMBP 17'' 2.8ghz 500gig HDD with the advertised 8 hr batterylife.

The settings I use on both the XP and OSX are:
6 Brightness
3 backlit keyboard
Sound output to Sony V6 headphones
Logitech MX518 mouse
Wifi on
Bluetooth turned off

On OSX with it using the 9400m, I'd get around 4:30 as I'd surf the web: check yahoo mail, google mail, engadget, youtube, ichat, and itunes.

On Windows XP, it'd obviously be using the 9600gt and be getting around the same time as I surf the same websites, use pidgin instead of ichat, and not use itunes at all, but use ventrilo. I'm also not a big fan of memory-hogging GUI, so on XP, I have it set to "Best performance" rather than the opposite with all the colorful GUI and such.

Just my 2c. I don't mean to judge much other than it gets way hotter with the 9600gt rolling, even on the osx--obvious hardware difference. Sorry for not clarifying this earlier! =\

On a sidenote, iLog.Genius--how are you liking the 500gig blue scorpio swap? Does it make enough of a difference to be worth it?
 
I can't get more than 2 hours with XP SP3, I think it's poor power management...
 
dudeitsjay said:
On a sidenote, iLog.Genius--how are you liking the 500gig blue scorpio swap? Does it make enough of a difference to be worth it?
Click to expand...

My first need was space so obviously went with the largest HDD capacity available which was 500GB. I fell into the trap of thinking 7200 > 5400. Sure in some instances the 7200 IS and WILL be faster for some tasks, but found that the WD HDD is pretty damn snappy (boot up times is still slow though). If you plan on upgrading, I'd go with the WD. Comparable performance, lower price tag.
 
Freyqq said:
have you owned a dell laptop in the last 3 years running xp or vista? I have both apples and pcs and both have their share of problems and benefits. I'm not going to get into a debate over which is better, but dells can run cool and get good battery life too.
Click to expand...

As someone who works for a department that has owned over three dozen Dell laptops over the last three years, all running XP, I can safely say this: Dell laptops are crap. They have shoddy build quality, are slow, badly designed (and the designs are more and more trying to copy Apple, and doing it badly) and to top it all off they run XP with is a fundamentally retarded OS. Not to mention the repeated failures of the integrated graphics chip (or the motherboard, Dell never really got to the bottom of that one, they just replaced the motherboard each time).

Have you tried the trackpad on a Dell laptop? It's useless. I have a 13-year-old PowerBook 1400c that has a smoother and more responsive trackpad. They've also tried to copy the functions of the Multi-Touch trackpad on some models, without making the pad larger or actually multi-touch, meaning if you touch the edges of the trackpad you set off scroll options or the likes. Fortunately they've given you the option to turn that off, but the trackpad is still ridiculously small.

Dell laptops are cheap, which is why they're everywhere - but they're also crap.
 
Th mobile hardware that I have the most experience is the Dell Latitude D500. On average you would get 3-3:30 hours off of it on Windows XP.

On my MacBook I'll get about an hour less of life under Windows compared to OS X. Has anyone checked the voltage differences between operating systems?
 
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