Windows 7 upgrades Vista laptops to lower battery life Laptop owners upgrading their Windows XP and Windows Vista machines to Windows 7 are complaining that Microsoft's new OS has severely reduced their available battery life. One user tells The Reg that after upgrading his circa 2007 HP notebook from Vista to Windows 7, the machine's battery life dropped from two hours to a half …
It's relative. If you have a road-warrior desktop replacement which is over three years old, three hours would be excellent! If you have a current netbook with all of the power saving features enabled, it's not. Remember that the eeePC 701 (the original 4GB SSD one) was only quoted as having about 3.5 hours of battery life with the high capacity battery, and that was only three and a bit years ago!
My trusty thinkpad T30, which is about 6 years old, gets about 1hr 20min. When it was new, the handbook said that it should have been 3-3.5 hours. If I still got 3 hours I would regard it as excellent, but as I only use it on batteries infrequently (part of the problem), it's no issue (and being a Thinkpad, I could always get a Chinese replacement battery for about 30 quid if it was).
Someone doesn't know their French.
So there's a battery alerter in Windows that drains the battery? Hmmm, what does that remind me of... Oh yeah! The "feature" in Windows Mobile that turns on the screen when your battery is dying, then keeps the screen on to make sure it dies as quickly as possible.
I am getting better battery life out of my Acer laptop under Windows 7 than I did with XP or Vista.
It's three years old and still on the original battery. Good for nearly 3 hours with wifi connected.
I was going to upgrade to a new machine this month, but Windows 7 has made the thing a whole lot snappier and good for another year.
...but I do (occasionally) look like one. And "Wala!" never fails to get my vibrating, arse-faced robo-goat. I expect "Tada!" sounds a bit unsophisticated. And suspiciously foreign, perhaps. Not that I'm lobbying for "Tada!".
Wala!
Where's the "Wala!" icon? And some music to put it to? (I suggest a minim at the very least. Though I'd want a crotchet for this rant).
Why the cock is the OS forcing a shutdown if the juice is still flowing? This isn't some server or mission critical set-up (which Windows is not certified for anyway); it's a freakin' laptop! Gone are the days when a sudden power loss would knacker a HDD...hello...auto-park!
If someone is dumb enough to run their battery into the ground and cause a sudden power loss and thus losing their work....that's their chuffin' look-out.
There's dumb, there's dumber and even dumberer.
Then there's your average Windows user.
Because it'd be a bit tricky to force a shutdown once the juice has stopped flowing, wouldn't it... In this context, "shutdown" should be interpreted as "closing down the OS in a controlled way so as to avoid any loss of data or filesystem integrity, allowing the system to restart without error once power is restored".
Take it from someone with personal experience of seeing an XP desktop PC knocked out by a power cut, which then blue screened on every attempt to restart it once power was restored, resisting every attempt to repair whatever damage had been done to the filesystem, and ending up requiring a clean reinstallation of XP and all third-party apps - given the choice of letting the OS enforce a controlled shutdown when it thinks the battery level is getting too low for comfort, or risking losing more than just the last few minutes of unsaved data when the system shuts down without warning, I'll happily leave the OS in charge here.
Let's face it, back in the day Win9x would fire off ScanDisk on a restart after a power outage. XP is total shit in that not only is ScanDisk severely broken (guys, learn the command line and use ChkDsk, it actually notices things ScanDisk ignored) but when the system loses power unexpectedly during a disc write, it will boot as far as loading the NTFS driver, then it will bluescreen with UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. Yeah, like the one it is actually booting FROM up until that point? It's a corrupted map. It's the time when ChkDsk SHOULD be invoked, automatically, if XP had any clue whatsoever.
But to reinstall XP and all the stuff? Aïe! No!
Google for "Hirren's Boot CD". Boot off the CD. Select to boot DOS. Choose the one with NTFS support. It will ask if you want to run its own ChkDsk. Let it fly. It will find and fix the error. Shut down, restart. Your file might be damaged but XP will be fine.
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I'm voting for deliberate malapropism too simply because of all the grammar Nazis who can't take a joke. Whoever thought that a Windows user could have had a sense of humour?
(I love posting in internet arguments in reply to posts correcting others' posts. Double bonus in this case for trans-forum pedantry. Now someone needs to 'STFU' or mention a famous dictator.)
Haven't you got a tablet thingy to worship somewhere?!
I own 4 macs and I think they are great machine, but they still have their own problems, the heat coming out of my Macbook annoys me no end. Nothing like Steve's baby frying my nads when I am on a train!
Perhaps try taking the blinkers off once in a while fanboi!
Once again the reg resorts to "daily mail" tactics and a bunch recationary "dail mail" readers go off on yet another anti microsoft tirade based on OPINION rather than FACTS. And no I'm not an MS fanboi - I just object to morons passing judgement when they don't know the FACTS. Grow up!
Windows 7 RTM has been available for almost 6 months now (since August 6th 2009 from Technet) - and of the millions of people who've installed it, a few random people have encountered problems?
And this is news?
By the way, Vista SP2 is called Vista SP2. It was released on May 26, 2009. Not that abject ignorance about the topic in hand ever stopped anyone else posting a comment to ElReg.
Windows 7 is not burning more juice, it is incorrectly saying that the battery is flat when it is not.
My Fujitsu tablet started doing exactly this when I upgraded to Windows 7. Runs for ten minutes or so and then tells me the battery is critically low. Boot it into Ubuntu and I've got 3 hours left.
Hope they fix it or guess which OS I will be booting into by default.
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