Sunday, June 21, 2009

Cost of crapware in battery life

I watched a presentation about power last week. Among other interesting numbers in it - a clean install of Vista has less than 1% of CPU utilization on idle; an image from an OEM (including a bunch of 3rd party software) had ~7%. An increment of 10% CPU utilization leads to 8% less battery life...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, I just love how Microsoft blames 3rd parties for all their woes. Yet when the user wants to ask, "Ok, so which application is wasting my battery/crashing my explorer/churning my disk" it is almost impossible to answer. Yes, it's still Microsoft's fault.

Sergey Solyanik said...

It is extremely easy to tell.

Bring up the task manager, and it will tell you what process uses what percentage of the CPU.

What exactly is impossible about this?

Anonymous said...

Notice I didn't mention CPU. It's easier to answer a question that wasn't asked.

Sergey Solyanik said...

You asked what is wasting my battery/crashing my explorer/churning my disk.

I answered the first and last question - all the data about "wasting the battery" (resource utlization) and "churning your disk" (disk utilization) is in the task manager, and as on the surface as it possibly can be without dumping this information directly to the desktop wallpaper.

While I am at it, let me answer your second question as well: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/Debugging/default.mspx.