back to article 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 …

COMMENTS

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  1. IT specialist
    Grenade

    Windows has always been a battery hog

    Look at the new Smartbooks getting 10 hours + battery usage on each charge.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      Not really...

      Windows has not always been a battery hog. My trusted Eee PC 1000 lasted 8+ hours on Windows XP, And Windows 7 has stricken it down to 4,5, or 6 at a push.

    2. N2

      Agreed

      And it makes me wonder how their new tablet toys will last running '7

  2. gollux
    Unhappy

    Testing Beta Software...

    is always such a pain, Will be fixed in Service Pack 1. Welcome to early adopter syndrome, don't get cut by the bleedin' edge.

    1. Atli
      Megaphone

      Microsoft 101...

      Do not upgrade until after Service Pack 1!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Microsoft's new OS has severely reduced their available battery life."

    Meet my friends "no shit" and "Sherlock"

  4. Mostor Astrakan

    Well...

    "But the company also says that in some cases, the new tool may be working properly."

    It's good to see that Microsoft's QA department is still doing its stuff in the way that we've come to expect of them.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Excellent?

    Quote: "I was having excellent battery life until I installed the RTM of Windows 7 - all RC and beta builds that I installed I had nearly three hours of battery."

    Nearly three whole hours is excellent? Wow! That's a bizzare assessment of what constitutes excellent imo.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      depends

      depends on the equipment in question, if it's some 17" desktop replacement SLI gaming laptop then 3 hours isn't bad at all!

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Stop

      3 hours.

      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).

  6. SuperTim

    It happens....

    New software on older hardware brings this stuff up sometimes. Didnt happen to my tosh laptop which continued as it had under vista. It is just a tweak after all!

  7. Greg J Preece

    Wala?

    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.

  8. Apocalypse Later

    The title is not the message

    "And wala! same issue"

    "Et viola," as the starving musician said.

  9. Bilgepipe
    Gates Horns

    Title

    Ballmer must have bought some shares in a battery company. That's hard disk companies, RAM companies and pie companies - he has quite a diverse portfolio...

  10. thefutureboy

    What the...?

    "Wala!" Good grief...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Most commenters on here...........

      Have enough trouble spelling English words and think that grammar is their mothers’ mother.

  11. KevinMillican
    Happy

    Not my Experience

    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.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm not a pedant...

    ...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).

  13. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    WTF?

    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.

    1. ChrisC Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      Why the cock is the OS forcing a shutdown if the juice is still flowing?

      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.

      1. heyrick Silver badge

        A reinstall?

        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.

  14. James 132
    Paris Hilton

    We must have been lucky

    Mainly Toshiba hardware here, of all flavours, and there doesn't appear to have been any changes or problems with battery life so far.

    Paris, because she's never short of batteries.

  15. James O'Brien
    Joke

    Well then

    Let the Anti-Windozetards unite here on the forums. Time to grab the popcorn.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Grenade

      Didn't we?

      ... see you on the last Apple article? Tards come in all flavours and colours y'know.

  16. Tim Croydon

    Wala!

    "And wala! same issue"

    Sackrace bleurgh. What will the French think of that?

  17. Will 30

    Don't help the stupid take over the world

    It's bad enough that the world is filling-up with people who think that "Voila!" is spelt "Whallah!".

    To provide an outlet for those who think it's spelt "wala!" is a crime against humanity. Please stop now.

  18. Daniel Bennett

    That explains my Macbook

    THat explains why my Macbook doesnt last as long on Windows 7 than it did on OSX.

    Ah well. 3 hours is still good

  19. Emo

    Curious

    I used to get 2.5hrs - 3hrs out of my admittedly aging HP NX6110, however W7 RC1 has never let me get anywhere near that, I chalked it up to it's age, but maybe not so...

  20. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    "wala!"

    *snigger*

    1. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
      Headmaster

      wala...

      Is an acronym, did you not know?

      Wala! Another L0s3r Announces...

  21. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Steve Renouf
      Boffin

      Wala??

      Or maybe he's Thai...

    2. Anonymous Bastard
      Joke

      My first impression

      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.)

      1. El Richard Thomas

        Rampant pedantry

        "I love posting in internet arguments in reply to posts correcting others' posts."

        You should check out the comment threads on failblog.com, if you haven't already. You would LOVE it there ;-)

  22. Matthew 4
    Thumb Down

    not true..

    My HP has suffered no such battery fail. In fact I find the power actually lasts longer due to several bugs being ironed out with the windows CPU usage controls.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Wouldn't happen on a Mac

    Because the software and hardware are designed to work properly together.

    1. dogged
      Stop

      Oh, certainly

      Apart from anything else, a Mac would tell YOU to consider replacing your battery. It would tell you to consider paying Apple to replace your battery.

    2. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD

      Actually...

      "Because the software and hardware are designed to work properly together."

      Because the software is only designed to work with a very limited set of hardware.

      Wala!

      F1xx0red.

    3. The Fuzzy Wotnot
      WTF?

      Oh shut up! Macs are perfect!

      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!

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Say! It will always be so?

    The trouble is that software solutions will always require more energy than custom hardware solutions and the way windows is presently designed really caters for mains powered desktop designs.

  25. Wayland Sothcott 1
    Gates Horns

    Battery sales

    Windows Genuine Advantage got many people phing up Microsoft with their credit card to pay them £90.

    This new microsoft feature is working correctly and will sell a great number of replacement batterys.

  26. Tachikoma1373

    Here we go again

    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!

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Oh really ?

      And what of the FACT that there are many people complaining about battery life ? Or are you the kind of person who, if this article had not been posted, would complain about the Reg ignoring battery issues with MS Vista SP2, aka Windows 7 ?

      1. Al Jones
        Flame

        Define "news"

        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.

  27. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

    7 + Battery..

    As my 'Big Netty' 12" Packard Bell ( dual core 1.8ghz) was 1hr 45 min ish on XP, now 1hr 30min or so under 7 Ultimate (64 bit) no big hit particulary, havent tried turning of the Aero twiddliness yet tho.

    Bluetooth stack needs fettling up though.....

  28. Camilla Smythe
    Boffin

    Aha Firmyware

    Could be different manufacturers have different battery sensing arrangements and Windows shiftyware is making assumptions on the basis that the firmyware is all reporting the 'same' numbers..... when it isn't.

  29. Red Bren
    Pint

    Look into the future...

    In a couple of weeks, Microsoft will announce, "We have investigated this issue in conjunction with our hardware partners and concluded that you all need to give us more money"

    Trebles all round!

  30. Tom 7

    Wala? Vouloir shurely

    As in "the next service pack will fix the problem, Vouloir."

    whats the icon for dont try punning in a foreign language?

    1. Adam 10
      Headmaster

      Vouloir?

      What, vouloir? The verb meaning "to want"?

      I guess we are left wanting a Service Pack, so perhaps it makes sense!

  31. Neill Mitchell

    A lot of commenters are missing the point

    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.

    1. GaryH

      why not ...

      just change the default action away from sleep / hibernate / shutdown when the battery reaches 3(?)% to do nothing. ok - it will just die when the battery is actually dead but you can at least use the blooming thing for a bit longer. I haven't noticed this problem on my HP laptop with the RC on it - does anyone know if the problem goes away if you plug in and then remove the power when the warnings start (giving it a short burst of power) - does it stay at critical or go back up to reasonable levels?

      1. Keith Oldham

        Re : why not ...

        Doesn't this risk data loss or disk corruption as the machine dies ?

        Sorry I'm not aware of how fault tolerant recent Windows file systems are.

        1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

          Fault tolerant ? Windows ?

          Excuse me while I get a new keyboard, this one just got sputtered on.

      2. markp 1
        Boffin

        because that gives you a bit more chance to find power

        annoying yes, but that means the battery has remaining juice in it to either a/ chuck data at the hard disk during hibernation (a power-hungry action that may take a few moments to kick in), b/ stay in standby for a few hours more (using a trickle of energy to keep the RAM refreshed), so that whilst you're waiting for your flight to land, or to find a plug, or buy a replacement charger or dealing with whatever emergency means you've run on to emergency reserve (going below 10% can be harmful to battery lifetime) the important document you were working on and only had maybe 20 minutes more work to do on it (... not the 5 or so that a typical 3% charge represents) won't be destroyed - either by you having forgotten to save, or that bit of the disk being garbled when the power finally fails.

  32. David Edwards
    Stop

    How many of you lot can read?

    As a very few of you have said, Windows is not consuming more juice, its just falsely warning that the battery is at low voltage. Depending on your power settings windows MAY turn off (or hibernate) you laptop at a certain level. The issue is that although in reality the battery is "fine" windows thinks its not. MS admits this as is clearly explained in the article.

    And im glad I read this as my Acer Ferrari 4000 has done just this sine WIN7 was installed. Thanks EL reg, I wont be buying that new battery then!!!!

  33. dave 93

    No doubt Jack 'MS' Schofield will spin it as a feature in the Guardian

    Strangely silent on the iPad so far....

  34. mkc
    Thumb Down

    My Fujitsu Lifebook E series does this

    "We recommend that you replace your battery", then goes from 100% to 20% within minutes and then shuts off . Was fine with Vista before the "upgrade" to Windows 7. My laptop has to be plugged in all the time now.

    1. Gis Bun
      Megaphone

      My Fujitsu Lifebook E series does this

      You can always go back to Vista. [hehehehe]

  35. Simbooth

    Same here

    I have a 2 year old HP dv9000; and was on the beta and the RC with no problems whatsoever. dish out £30 to upgrade to W7 Pro (student discount) and all of a sudden there is this problem, as well as an issue with the sound card (or to be more precise how hp's quicktouch buttons interact with it).

    Ran powercfg /energy to generate a report, and it seems that the full capacity of the battery is being misreported, leading windows to believe that the battery is only charging to about 40% capacity, which triggers the alert. Personally the only thing I seem to have noticed in commmon between the laptops is the BIOS (Phoenix). I've also contacted HP support, and they just didnt have a clue WTF was going on.

    One Service Pack 1 with fries please!

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Wala

    By God! He's swearing in Arabic (perhaps).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Good to see the school boy french continues

      I'm guessing he meant voila and wasn't speaking Tagalog

      1. FreeTard
        FAIL

        Wala!

        Oh good Jeebus.

        Epic fail there son.

  37. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Joke

    "in some cases, the new tool may be working properly"

    Newsflash : Microsoft may have finally made a tool that actually works from time to time, in some specific cases.

  38. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    It sounds like a useless tool

    Supplied by a bunch of fairly useless tools.

  39. Rolanddd

    not affecting T60 thinkpads

    Hopefully they put out an update for the affected laptops quick as I am sure that must be quite annoying. Luckily my company's Thinkpads are unaffected and I actually see better battery run times since upgrading them from Vista to 7.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    2008 Dell Vostro 1700

    Reports 53 mins with 73% charge under Windows 7. Same laptop reports 1 hour 32 mins with 85% under Ubuntu 9.10. Make of that what you will...

  41. Andy Jones
    WTF?

    Hang on a fine mo ...

    Didn't that bird in the taxi claim there was better battery life under Windows 7? The lying bitch. Anyone got her address? I am fecking suing her! Windows 7 was her idea after all.

  42. Cucumber C Face
    Coat

    Same amount of work with Win 7?

    <winge>two hours to a half hour</winge>

    They probably just lost the infernal intervals on Vista where nothing happens for no apparent reason during which it can't even muster an hourglass :-(

    Also any hardware vendor['s bespoke battery management software is going to get blown away in an OS reinstall.

    Or maybe the batteries are just four years older than when they timed it with Vista?

  43. James Pickett

    Alternative

    "consider replacing your battery"

    Why not "consider replacing your OS" (with a useful pull-down list of alternatives, like XP and a selection of Linux distros)?

  44. tanker1
    Thumb Up

    Thanks for the heads-up

    My Fujitsu Xi 2528 started blinking battery warnings and shutting down (for "shutting down" read "turning off completely without shutting down") after 5 minutes a couple of weeks ago. I had presumed that my battery was dead and was about to order a new one at £90 so many thanks El Reg for saving me some hard earned cash. Roll on the patch for this.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    never had power problems on my laptop under 7

    I run a Sony Vaio and get 8+ hrs out of it when I put Windows into power save profile, yes I loose all the funky aero stuff etc but not really that bothered when I just want it last all day.

    When I run full fat version i.e. all aero etc battery lasts about 5 hours.

    These figures are both better than what I used to get on vista, most pepole I know that have switched to 7 have also had the same experience.... battery life is better in 7.

    Of the poeple I know that didnt have a positive experience first time round it was because they had power profiles that run at full speed and had missing or incorrect drivers.

  46. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    Windows 7 is great

    I have been running Windows 7 on all of my machines since the RC releases and they are running very fine. The battery life is much better than it was on fugly XP. The performance is also snappier. So, all in all, XP sucks balls and Windows 7 FTW.

  47. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    the last 20 years

    Yep, that nicely sums up the last 20 years of MS history: "But the company also says that in some cases, the new tool may be working properly."

  48. Bill Fresher
    Thumb Up

    Excellent

    'Wala' has made my day and will henceforth become part of my vocabulary.

  49. This post has been deleted by its author

  50. dark1here

    Lower battery life

    My Toshiba does similar. Is there any way of shutting off this useless feature, as the BIOS is quite capable of shutting it down when needed. I have heard of premature ejaculation but premature capitulation is new to me!

  51. J 3
    Joke

    Must be said

    Windows 7 is not ready for the desktop, how can they get something that basic wrong, etc. etc. etc. (just copy and paste from some commentard on a story about any Linux distro)

    Ceci n'est pas une joke.

  52. Gis Bun

    Battery life

    The question is whether it's a Windows 7 issue or the drivers from the manufacturers. If those who installed Windows 7 used the default drivers from Windows 7, I suspect the battery life may not be as long. Did they look at the manufacturer's web site for updates?

  53. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    ACPI

    "But the company also says that in some cases, the new tool may be working properly. In other words, if it says your battery needs replacing, it may need replacing. But for so many laptops owners posting to TechNet, this is clearly not the case."

    Brilliant! I'll just put warnings in *my* OS saying the hard drive's bad, battery's bad, the computer's too slow, and you need more RAM. The warnings will all be true SOMETIMES.

    -----

    "Also any hardware vendor['s bespoke battery management software is going to get blown away in an OS reinstall."

    No it's not, this stuff is handled by ACPI, it's in the system BIOS.

    So... 2 possibilities.

    1) Windows 7 has ACPI bugs. I won't rag on them for this (as long as they fix it promptly), ACPI spec is fairly complex, and it's interactions with the OS are too.

    2) Microsoft's umm.. Microsoftian ploys are backfiring on them. Microsoft provides an ACPI compiler that produces (slightly) non-standard ACPI, this initially caused problems for non-Windows ACPI implementations (until they made them "bug compatible" with the Windows ACPI interpreter).. if Windows 7's ACPI code was redone maybe it doesn't deal with this. Also the ACPI table will check the OS... Windows 2000, Windows XP, "Windows XP SP1", XP SP2, Vista shows as "Windows 2006", etc. Often times these tables are just plain broken if the OS is unrecognized (and some few check for "Linux" and return broken tables too!). It has been suggested Microsoft encouraged these broken tables, so Windows would run smooth while other OSes crap out on the same machine. On these BIOSes, Windows 7 will probably not show up as "Windows 2006", it'll be unrecognized, and a broken table could be returned -- they are being hoisted by their own petard. The 3 solutions. 1) BIOS updates all around (to fix the ACPI tables). 2) The Linux solution, it now claims it is Windows 2000, XP, 2003, *and* Vista for ACPI purposes, to make sure it doesn't get some broken "default" or even worse broken "Linux" table. 3) Least attractive solution -- Linux supports loading custom ACPI tables, so I suppose Windows could too -- people will retrieve the broken ACPI tables, fix the bugs, and post the fixed table online to load at boot time.

  54. Jonny F
    Thumb Up

    Win7 doubled by HP laptop/tablet battery life

    Funny, when anyone asks me why i like Windows 7 i reply that the battery life on my laptop is at least doubled from Vista!

    HP swivel screen laptop/tablet. Never going back to Vista to test it, but i recon i get 3X the battery life much of the time.

  55. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    FLP

    Noticed this with FLP too. My 2006 Toshiba barely lasts 20 mins compared to 2 hours with vanilla XP!

  56. David Haig
    Unhappy

    Crept into Vista as well?

    My wife's 1 year old Dell Inspiron has just started doing this in the last week - and it's running Vista Home. Hasn't effected the performance but it is very annoying. especially as it's just bloody Microsoft doesn't seem to cut it anymore.

  57. Wallyb132
    FAIL

    a broken clock...

    "But the company also says that in some cases, the new tool may be working properly."

    thats as good as saying a broken clock is right twice a day...

  58. Watashi

    Buggy

    Well, it seems MS still can't release an OS without any bugs in it! Of course, this wouldn't be an issue on the iPad as users can't change their own batteries anyway.

  59. Richard Cartledge
    Happy

    Get a Mac

    Win 7 works fine on my Macbook Pro. It must be the hardware partners.

  60. Adrian Esdaile
    Happy

    FWIW: Asus N10 OK!

    Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit, Asus N10 with 2GB RAM - no problems. Have been running Win 7 since RTM version, haven't seen any behaviour like this, use the dear little N10 a lot on trains / planes on battery power. Still getting 5-6 hours with the Nvidia chipset activated and running Autodesk Revit (All your RAM are belong Autodesk arrrr har!)

    So, no problems here.

    MS fanboi rapidly becoming Apple fanboi, too I might add.

  61. Kilgaard
    Alien

    Not just affecting laptops

    I came home on Friday to find my (custom built) *desktop* computer had shutdown due to low battery. At the time I just passed it off as my kids putting the computer into suspect rather than shutdown, but now I'm not so sure.

  62. My New Handle
    FAIL

    Wala!

    The last time I heard that was from Omid Jalili in Hammersmith. Does he read The Reg?

    Win 7 has worked okay on the Samsung NC10 that several variants of Ubuntu have had difficulty with. They seem a matched pair (not sure that is a good thing really).

    What a pi55er that M$ are still making the cock-ups that they have always. Fewer, perhaps. But they still have the talent for breaking the simplest but most impacting. I'd cop the complete arse if I had bought a replacement battery on the strength of Win 7's dubious warning. One wonders how many people have done just that ...

    Epic ...

  63. Tezfair

    My battery dead too...

    However as for better battery life I would dispute this. Under XP the CPU hardly ran unless I was doing a lot of stuff. Under vista and W7 it runs constantly. With near double of background processes its going to draw more power - my powerpack squeaks when its been asked to supply more power so under XP - quiet, under WV or W7 squeaking!!

    Its more likely the battery technology has improved the running time rather then W7 making the improvements.

  64. AlexShu
    Alert

    Battery

    My battery is wrong! I was after install Windows 7 on my netbook. (Samsung NC10). I don't know is it a problem in W7 or another...but it's a fact.!

    I'm from Russia.

  65. markp 1
    Alert

    what's it like with brand new batteries?

    Having run my lappy for a few years now and still being happy with its XP performance, my upgrade plan is currently along the lines of doubling (and maxing) the RAM, laying in a second replacement battery, getting the last and largest of the 2.5" IDE disks (as its too old for SATA) and upgrading to a middling version of Win 7, skipping Vista entirely. Beats mucking about with a netbook, so long as 7 can deal with i915 graphics.

    This kind of malarkey could be well annoying though...... does it just affect well worn batteries that are maybe halfway through their useful life (as my current one is), or all of 'em? Or is it a specifically Vista upgrade thing that can be ignored?

  66. heyrick Silver badge
    Alert

    OMFG!

    I'm reading all the quotes of battery life in various situations. Let's just say my eeePC901 XP gets around six and a half hours out of a charge. More if I turn off WiFi, like when I pop in the SD card containing all the MP4 stuff my PVR has recorded off satellite TV.

    Seriously, what use to me is a computer that can maybe manage an hour and a half and that's NOT when the OS is misreporting reality?

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