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Mac OS X Beats Vista In MacBook Pro Battery Life Tests

Florent Alzieu
October 30, 2008 5:15 PM
The results of our battery life tests on the MacBook Pro under Mac Os X and Windows Vista are in and they give a classic example of how to handle--and how not to handle--power management.

We tested the same laptop on both operating systems using conditions that were as similar as we could make them.


On both platforms, we set brightness to 100 cd/m², turned off Bluetooth and WiFi and played a DivX movie on repeat until the battery was so empty the MBP went into standby.

In Mac OS X, we chose the power profile with the best energy consumption, which, for instance, deactivates the graphics card when it is not needed.

Things were a little more complicated under Vista.  This is partly because there are no official Nvidia drivers for the 9400M chipset used by the MBP, meaning you can't configure it as a regular component from Control Panel.  We were forced to overide the system and try the 177.81 drivers, which, should, in theory, work with this hardware.

Here's the results:




As you can see, our efforts with Vista were in vain and the battery life results were very weak: it barely scrapes past an hour while under Mac OS X you can keep on going for over three.

Of course, this test is far from entirely representative--we don't imagine many people will be buying a MacBook Pro to watch movies in Vista, for instance, when it's something you can do perfectly easily from inside Mac OS X, or any other computer for instance. 

We'd also expect far better results if Apple made it possible to install graphics drivers using Boot Camp.


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