Windows Vista May Cause Laptop Batteries to Drain Faster

Laptop users who upgrade to Windows Vista from Windows XP, may have to disable some of the new operating system’s graphics features such as Aero to avoid a decrease in battery life. Also, it is reported that wireless connection under Vista may cause notebook batteries to drain faster.

The power consumption for Vista notebook users will rise because of extra power needed to run the high-end processors, graphics cards and memory capacity required to support Vista, Info World reports.

“Vista demands more compute resources for a given application than XP does. So you need a heavier battery or you will have shorter battery life because of the greater demand for watts,” said Phil Hester, chief technology officer of AMD, in remarks made at the company’s annual analyst day in New York on Thursday.

Dell also said that Vista’s appetite for computing resources will increase its draw on battery power.

“If Vista is run in full Aero mode, with none of the Vista-provided power management settings turned on, it is likely to demand more power, and have an impact on battery life,” said Dell spokesman Ira Williams, in an e-mail interview to Info World.

Increased battery draining when Vista is used may also come from wireless network connection, since some wireless access points are not configured to take advantage of Windows Vista’s wireless power-saving mode.

Microsoft’s senior product manager Jason Leznek said the company decided to change the default power setting of wireless adapters to “maximum performance”, instead of power saving mode.

“Test results from Microsoft and our customers show that some Windows Vista beta users experienced connectivity problems when connecting to public Wi-Fi hotspots. In many cases, the root cause of the problem is access point or router hardware which is not compatible with the 802.11 power save protocol,” said Leznek in his blog.

On the other hand, Microsoft says that Windows Vista will allow users to disable or tune down graphics, screen brightness, volume, as same as wireless networking and other to keep battery life longer under the new OS.

The business version of the Microsoft’s new Windows OS was released last month with the consumer version scheduled to arrive on January 30, 2007.