Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Vista drain a battery! and Vista Battery Saver is very useful

Yesterday, I posted a beta version of Vista Battery Saver. It made a lot of wind over the statement, that Vista Aero Interface together with Windows Sidebar drain your laptop battery.

The same day at night, Nick White from development team wrote, that he has a hesitation about this statement in Windows Vista Blog. Even Jeff Atwood called me to stop voodooing... But now I have evidence, that approve my doubts. Here is comes.

Dell Latitude D820 with Windows Vista Ultimate on it works one hour more on battery without Aero and Sidebar running

If you do not believe me, here my proves.

image

Here the comparison of 20 minutes of working (regular everyday working) in my computer with and without Vista Battery Saver. It 5% difference of final charge rate. We can solve simple equation to understand, that if my battery loss 16% with Aero and 11% without in 20 minutes, it'll be completely empty within about 2 hours with and within about 3 hours without those fun features. So I was completely right, writing this simple yet useful program.

I realize, that it's possible that the part of sidebar is much more, then the part of aero, but it still makes a lot of sense to use such savers.

For those, who really interested with calculations, raw excel file is attached.

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