Because a combination of Windows 7 and virtualization makes life interesting.
Per Engadget, a Microsoft statement from last week claiming that the company would look into reports of Windows 7 causing premature battery degradation on notebook computers has led to Microsoft stating that Windows 7 isn’t to blame.
According to the company’s testing, the new tool, which reports when a battery is down to 40% of its designed capacity and suggests replacement, hasn’t reported a single false positive. Additionally, the tool uses read-only data from the battery, and is in fact incapable of tweaking the battery’s life span or internal data, as it merely reports the data it receives, and stacks the theoretical design capacity up against the current full charge capacity.
Microsoft has attributed negative reports to the mere fact that many people might not have noticed the degradation already taking place in their batteries, as most batteries start to degrade noticeably within a year. The company has also stated that it will continue to look into the issue, but for now this sounds like a bit of a non-issue.
Whether or not Windows 7 lives up to one of its featured claims about helping to use a notebook’s battery life more conservatively remains to be seen, both on conventional PC notebook hardware and on Apple’s MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air hardware.
If you’ve tried Windows 7 on your notebook hardware and have either positive or negative feedback regarding its effects on the battery life, let us know.
One reply on “Microsoft Releases Findings on Windows 7 Battery Issue”
I have had Win7 on my asus eeepc 100h since RC2 (currently I have Enterprise 32bit). The unit’s battery operation got erratic shortly after the first Win7 install. Basically, the battery will run down normally (about 3hrs of continuous use with WiFi in my case), then fail to charge now matter how long the charger is on. After some time, a few days of non-use or a dozen shutdown/turnon cycles, the unit will charge charge normally and I get another few cycles of normal use. The current cycle, for instance is normal after about 2 weeks of the computer sitting off without the charger on. I plugged it in last Sunday and it started a normal charge, was full about 30min ago and is down to 74% now. I think most normal cycles have started after a Windows update, but could not verify that. Hope it stabilizes at some point. Tried putting XP pro back on once, but it did not return the setup to normal operation so put 7 back on. I got the machine in Aug 08 and it ran normally with XP until I put RC2 on in about Feb 09.