Windows 7 extremely poor battery life?

[Si_]

Hey,

I've recently installed the RC on a notebook previously running XP. I've noticed though that on XP I would get ~3hrs battery life, and on windows 7 i'll get an hour, if i'm lucky.

I'm using the 'power saver' profile, so the screen is dimmed, aero is off etc, the processor is set to never go above 50% etc, but battery life is still unacceptably poor.

For me this is a real deal breaker, I do a lot of work while not connected to AC so getting just 1hr out of a battery when I could get 3 is not going to happen. Am I missing something here or is windows 7 really this bad on notebooks?

[Avlor]

That's strange, for me 7 bumped up battery life from 3-3.30h under XP to 4.5-5h, which was awesome to find out. Maybe you should let it run for several days, to let it index and prefetch everything so that it would stop using hdd while on battery..

[raider360]

That's strange, for me 7 bumped up battery life from 3-3.30h under XP to 4.5-5h, which was awesome to find out.

That makes me wanna try W7 under my HP laptop :)

[Si_]

Hmm using a HP 6910p here and it is just so poor.

The hdd is doing little to nothing whilst idle, so maybe it has done all its indexing and whatnot, but is still draining battery like it's going out of fashion. Is there anything I can check??

Saying that, it does seem to think it's charging excessively fast, e.g charged 35% in under 15mins, which usually is reported slower under XP. Perhaps windows 7 thinks the battery is much lower capacity than it is?

[Avlor]

Saying that, it does seem to think it's charging excessively fast, e.g charged 35% in under 15mins, which usually is reported slower under XP. Perhaps windows 7 thinks the battery is much lower capacity than it is?

Try installing Everest and checking battery capacity in Power Management section, when the laptop is fully charged.. However, that would be very weird if usable battery capacity depended on the OS

[hdood]

You could open a command line and run "powercfg /energy /output test.html" and then see if there's anything interesting in test.html.

[Si_]

got a few of these:

USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Suspend

The USB device did not enter the Suspend state. Processor power management may be prevented if a USB device does not enter the Suspend state when not in use.

Platform Power Management Capabilities:PCI Express Active-State Power Management (ASPM) Disabled

PCI Express Active-State Power Management (ASPM) has been disabled due to a known incompatibility with the hardware in this computer.

Power Policy:802.11 Radio Power Policy is Maximum Performance (Plugged In)

The current power policy for 802.11-compatible wireless network adapters is not configured to use low-power modes.

[excalpius]

Ah those would do it. Some of your biggest power drainers aren't standing by at all!

You're going to need updated drivers. :)

Perhaps in the RTM...as that's just the sort of thing that will be added before release in July.

[dafin0]

You could open a command line and run "powercfg /energy /output test.html" and then see if there's anything interesting in test.html.

thanks for that command line very usefully and great to know

[Udedenkz]

Speaking of Power Management - the CPU % on battery option doesn't do anything on my laptop - why ain't it greyed out?

[blunden]

On my laptop the BIOS didn't fully support the power functions before I flashed it with the latest BIOS. Doesn't seem to be the problem here but I thought it might be good for other people to consider. :)