Short Battery Life Sinks First Windows 8 Notebooks

Philgates

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Short Battery Life Sinks First Windows 8 Notebooks

Confusing dual-mode operating system, no Start button, counterintuitive swipe gestures? None of these things spells doom for Windows 8. What will kill Microsoft's newest operating system is the abysmal battery life of the systems on which it's supposed to perform the best.

For all of Windows 8's strengths, its one major weakness might be something no one saw coming; significantly worse battery life than the previous generation of PCs.

Leading up to the launch of Windows 8, we saw progressively longer endurance on the two most-portable categories of notebooks. As of September, the average ultraportable (a notebook with a screen size of 11 to 13 inches and weighing less than 4 pounds) lasted 6 hours and 52 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test (Web surfing via Wi-Fi, screen at 40% brightness). The average thin-and-light (12 to 14 inches, less than 6 pounds) was right behind, at 6 hours and 40 minutes.

win8battery1_1.jpg
However, when we started adding Windows 8 notebooks to the mix, those averages receded faster than Steve Ballmer’s hairline. By November, the ultraportable average dropped by half an hour, and the average thin-and-light decreased by 10 minutes. A number of challenges face OEMs and Microsoft when it comes to the adoption of Windows 8, from design to pricing. But solving all those issues will be moot until they fix the most basic requirement for any laptop — good battery life. www.laptopmag.com



Link: Short Battery Life Sinks First Windows 8 Notebooks
 

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just curious but are the systems running the same internal hardware ie cpu's/gpu's?
 

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What a croc.

First, you can't compare different devices battery times and then blame the OS. Unless those devices are identical in design (power consumption and battery capacity), then the problem may be that the hardware is either lacking battery or that the CPU or other devices are drawing too much power.

All this is doing is comparing categories, which may have absolutely nothing to do with the OS.

Finally, 10 minutes at more than 6 house is within the margin of error on any measurement. 30 minutes is a little more, but we're talking about a 7% drop, which may be a tradeoff for more power, or lighter weight.

Finally, battery life depends greatly upon how you use it. Most people will never even notice a difference at those levels.
 

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just curious but are the systems running the same internal hardware ie cpu's/gpu's?






Just updated the post with link to original article!..................:thumb:
 

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Personally, I wouldn't call that a huge difference/drop, the worst is only 8%. You don't get outstanding battery life from the current processors (non-ARM).
 

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What a croc.

First, you can't compare different devices battery times and then blame the OS. Unless those devices are identical in design (power consumption and battery capacity), then the problem may be that the hardware is either lacking battery or that the CPU or other devices are drawing too much power.

All this is doing is comparing categories, which may have absolutely nothing to do with the OS.

Finally, 10 minutes at more than 6 house is within the margin of error on any measurement. 30 minutes is a little more, but we're talking about a 7% drop, which may be a tradeoff for more power, or lighter weight.

Finally, battery life depends greatly upon how you use it. Most people will never even notice a difference at those levels.




Agree with user use, think you need to check out the original article, link added which will give you better idea, though the main point is, that Windows 8 was going to be a leader in battery life, hence why Microsoft cut out so much software from it, the margins from win 7 show, that Windows 8 is not going to be the market leader on battery life that it was hailed to be by Microsoft, if the early indications from this lab test are indicative of.
 

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it's a known problem, that battery's flat out suck, they really need to do something about this.

cheers phil i'll have a look at the list and see if their are any that have as close to identical hardware and what the difference is there.
 

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seems that the major difference is the touchscreen, and higher resolutions.
 

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Why not compare both OS's on the same system? Its quite obvious touch screens draw more power. Also I wouldn't call the difference "significant".
 

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What???

I have to call some BS on this as I've never seen anywhere saying that battery life is sucky on Windows 8, if anything, Windows 8 INCREASES battery life.
 

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sound good to me either way ,, given that the battery in my laptop [5yrs old ] only last 55 min.lol
 

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Why not compare both OS's on the same system? Its quite obvious touch screens draw more power. Also I wouldn't call the difference "significant".

And window8 is a touch screen ui to test that on a non touch screen in not fair either.
 

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What???

I have to call some BS on this as I've never seen anywhere saying that battery life is sucky on Windows 8, if anything, Windows 8 INCREASES battery life.

it's not bs at all, the savings windows 8 makes on normal systems without the higher resolutions and touch are lost when those two are added again.

higher res draws more power from the gpu
touchscreen draws more power.

so the end result is about the same battery life...seems about right to me.

the problem that this article should be focusing on instead of making comparisons that can't be fully appreciated is the abomination that is current battery technology.

1-2 years ago, a change was found that allowed a battery to charge in under 5 minutes, this was done by changing the size and shape of the 2 metal parts of the capacitor...the current limiting factor in charging speed, simply put the current capacitors take longer to store their charge....the better question is why hasn't this been adopted yet?

why are batteries so crap? it's actually quite simple really, money.
do you honestly think a regenerating circuit is difficult to build into a phone? well with current battery tech it wouldn't work well as they take to long to charge.

it all ends up coming down to money.

and that's a rant at the shocking state of the battery industry over for the next year.
 

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