Core Duo power consumption solved

[Steve]

Recently, the folks at Tom's Hardware did some battery life testing with Intel's Core Duo platform. With disappointing results, they pinned the short life on the CPU or graphics card. However, after further testing and discussion with Intel, OEMs and Microsoft, it looks like a dodgy driver from MS is causing the problem.

Late Friday, Microsoft acknowledged to TG Daily - via the hands of Intel - that they believe the problem our engineers observed to have been caused by a misbehaving driver included in Windows XP SP2 - specifically, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) driver, which is part of the operating system's power management scheme for USB 2.0.

The delicate issue about this bug, provided to Microsoft partners under confidentiality guidelines as Knowledge Base article KB899179, is the fact that it has been known to be a "problem" at least since 12 July 2005. It is unclear at this time why Microsoft has not issued a patch or an advisory the public to fix or explain this bug. So far, Microsoft has not responded to our inquiries and we are still waiting for a comment on this power drain issue.

[TG Daily]

[directhex]

so... how's the battery life of a core duo running osx or linux?

[darrensen]

so... how's the battery life of a core duo running osx or linux?

Is was about to buy the Vaio Duo Core....i better hold off for the moment!! Bl00dy M$

[directhex]

Is was about to buy the Vaio Duo Core....i better hold off for the moment!! Bl00dy M$

buy it and run linux

[nvening]

i too am about to buy that laptop, will it be fixed or what?

[badass]

Do NOT buy Sony laptops. They have good build quality but not enough testing and their tech support is un-fecking believably bad!
Consider IBM/Lenovo ones instead :thumbs:

[Funkstar]

i'm sure i read that even if MS are not in a hurry to patch the problem, Intel are working on it. I'm guessing they will release their own driver/patch, just like they did with Win95 and UDMA (am i remembering that right, was it UDMA driver from intel you had to install??)

http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/29/c...rosoft-driver/

linking to:

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/28/to...r_drain_issue/

[nvening]

I have experience the sony service and i had a 1st class experience

[TheAnimus]

I asked a mate of mine who's a bit of a chipset buff the question, how can the USB sub-system be draining that much power? In short we couldn't figure out how it could drain *that* much power! Also its worth noting that linux's ACPI isn't any better than windows on this one.

For a start this came from tom's hardware, which lately has become, well only a bit trusted.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/...se/page25.html

if you look the reviewer comments that a 64bit offering would do better for office work and the like?

Well i fear to think what his idea of office work is! Vista's 64bit enhancements are only really shown in demanding tasks which require 64bit precision.

Also on the same page, he talks about "lame hard disks built into mobile computers" Where has he been the past few years?! The seagate momentus 5,400rpm's are riveling the speed of a 7,200rpm of 3 years back. The new sata ones with NCQ provide a boost, and manifacturers are adding still more cache. Sure as he's trying to state, HDDs are a bottle necks on portables, but he ignores idea like oodles of ram, so no pagefile.

He then goes on about how dual cores let you realise a virus scan is running in the background while you switch around between a number of apps, while the system remains ready to respond to the keyboard. A virus scan on my system tends to take longer on the HDD than anything else obviously, and on a laptop everything grinds to a hault because of the disk access bottleneck.