@ Ron

You do know hibernate is the exact same thing as shutdown is from a hardware perspective...right?

Other than that there have been zero studies showing shutting down increases hardware fatigue.

And people blithely accepting DRM in their daily lives is horrible too, but as long as you have the latter, you'll have the former.
If you don't like Vista-bashing, you have three solutions :
1) go back and bury your head in the sand (leaving your rear end readily available for its daily MS-sponsored shafting)
2) stop using the Internet
3) grow a brain and stop reading articles about MS or any MS product on this site (and many others)

Personally, I'd rather you chose option 2.

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO SAVE ON ENERGY BILL,THEN USE AN LCD MONITOR.
IM USING THE WINDOWS VISTA AND IT DOES SAVES ENERGY!TERRIFIC?!HEHEHEH!
THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

I'm getting a bit tired of the anti-Microsoft attitudes of this publication. I appreciate the news and your unique take on stories, but I think the Microsoft-bashing has gotten to the point of being automatic without actually looking at the facts involved, nor the competing solutions in the marketplace. If OSX, or Linux come out with a new innovation, it's praised, whereas with XP/Vista it's sarcastically dismissed. Similarly, if there's a security problem with OSX or Linux, it's disclosed with dignity and praise for the steps taken to address it, but with XP/Vista it's jokes all round. We all like to have a good laugh at the pompousness of the market leaders (MS, Google, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, AT&T) but let's not let our personal biases blind us from promoting innovation when we see it, even if it's crapped out the a$$ of the elephant.

"if your running and old P3"
If you can't form coherent sentences then there's really no way I'm going to value your opinion. Especially not if you're going to try and tell me that Vista is more stable than XP, I work all day with both and as a statement that's simply false. It may be that your old XP rig crashed a lot, but that says a lot more about your configuration than the OS.

Am I the only one that is more productive on Vista than XP? 
I never ever want to be without start menu search (just to name 1 point)...

This senseless bashing gets tired...

If it's better at power saving why did it run down the battery on my laptop twice as fast as XPpro?

Why was the fan permanently on full blast?

As for switching off computers, I switch off our computers every night. It's 4 years old now and has never had a problem.

Make an operating system so awful you never want to turn it on!


Relaunch Windows XP with Aero Interface... And it will sell better than the windows Vista.... :P

Microsoft claims, here we go again, blah blah blah, bs blah blah blah bs bs blah blah bs bs bs.
And environmentalists claim cows produce the most organic environmentally unfriendly gas.

I've been using Vista ever since i've had this new machine (Core2Duo 1.86 overclocked to 3 GHz, 3GB, 8800GTS etc etc...), i've never had probelms with it...in fact i have loved it on my new machine cos it runs like butter. But the power savings!! that comes last when u have a rig like that...this is exactly the problem. when microsoft was at the initial designs of Vista, they were so optimistic that they had concluded that everyone is either buying a new machine or are ready to upgrade!! very costly assumption. Infact...if anyone else had done the same mistake, they would'nt even have a chance to read the reviews...lol...

Vista would run just fine on any of the newer machines...may be not as good as XP. i guess, Vista made such bad first impressions that even people that have newer machines are not ready to try it!

On a different note, anyone here knows anything about this vanishing disk space on Vista?...ive been sufferening from it on my machine for a while now...my C: drive just keeps shrinking without anything new going in...its especially bad when one does a disk defragmentation

I bet it's like the MS Vista is faster then XP / XP is faster then 98... by using old hardware for the old OS.

Bet they used a fast P4 and a big ass video card for XP and a low power core with integrated graphics for Vista.

Yeah right. We all know each succeeding MS OS eats up more CPU cycles than its predecessor. More CPU cycles means more energy consumption, unless Vista turns off your monitor while you're playing games or your hard disk while you're saving that important business document.

Hmm... Good question indeed: how do you save power and yet require a more powerful system to run?

The answer is pretty simple actually: people use Vista for a while, get fed up of seeing it crash and switch the damn thing off! Major power savings right there people. MS figured this out way ahead of us, this is genius!

Rob - I think you are a little confused. The Atom processor is ultra low powered, but an Atom system isn't. Much better to get an AMD low power cpu and a 780G based mb.

Makes perfect sense. You get frustrated faster and turn it off in disgust earlier.

TADAAAA! Power savings

Vista doesn't need multicores. Vista will run happily on any machines with 2GB of RAM. RAM is what it needs, not a powerful CPU.

New PCs are not necessarily more power hungry. SATA, DDRII uses less power than IDE and DDR1 for comparison. Newer CPUs have much better power saving features than older CPUs, such as low power sleep states.

Vista on default power setting is more aggressive than XP in reducing power usage. HDD is turned off more often than in XP. I suppose Vista have built in drivers for the Intel SpeedStep or AMD Cool n' quiet.

...if the wife's brand new Vista Business laptop that she got from work is anything to go by. She tried to run a couple of programs on it, it didn't work so she chucked it in a drawer and continued using her old system.

You've got to admit that its definitely using less power than her old system.



yeh well it would wouldnt it, with all that down time :O)

Doesn't wista require a faster cpu and a nice toasty video card to properly check those tilt bits?

After going through our enterprise and deploying simple centralized power management settings, I have to agree...partially.

Vista's power controls are much more granular, there are several more controls which is nice. 

The problem comes when you have to shoehorn enough hardware into a machine to run Vista decently, you lose most of that benefit in both power consumption and in dollars spent upgrading.

Vista has higher CPU utilization for a given task than XP does, and its accelerated Aero Glass interface forces the GPU to work in 3D mode instead of energy saving 2G mode. The result on a laptop is significantly shorter battery run time. How is that saving energy?

Vista sp1 now supports EFI bios , which only apple is selling at the moment in its Mac's. Vista 64 also supports more than 4gb memory . 8gb(2 x 4gb) sodimms are very expensive at the moment as only kingston is selling them , but soon they will be available fot the masses as more sellers join the 8gb sodimm club.

Without any verified tables/charts/numbers on the subject how is anyone to know if he is talking out of his thermal exhaust port.
Epic Fail

If you solely monitor CPU usage it does save power but when you add the extra power needed to run Aero on your 3D graphics card and the more powerful machine needed to run Vista in the first place you'll not be saving any energy or money.


...that the Vista savings are out weighed by the need to replace the trusty old 800Mhz PC that was happily running 2000/XP with a monstrous multi-core PC with a video card hotter than Satan's posterior!

A Linux server running the Linux Terminal Server Project (www.ltsp.org) with old desktop machines (Pentium 3 machines with no hard disks, booting from the network) as clients also saves power too, and probably a darn sight more than running Vista.

If a company doesn't want to use old desktops, maybe some of these new Atom systems with their low power requirements would make great client machines with speeds matching native desktop speeds (this is going on using a Dell PowerEdge Quad Core Xeon Server with 4GB Ram and a notebook terminals attached to 1GBit ethernet).

Rob

I wonder how that works?

XP on dual-core Athlon, versus Vista on Intel EE, comparable responsiveness...

saves power to run the Intel EE?

I think this might be one of those Microsoft Sponsored(tm) studies we all know and love...

it has gotten a little old, (the vista bashing), ive been running the 64 bit on all my computers and it runs excellent, much smoother and stable than XP, and thats with all nVidia products nForce boards and running SLI, and never had a problem, if you have the power then run vista, if your running and old P3 or P4 with 512mb memory and an onboard video chip your gonna have problems, most business pc's are low end and going to have problems

Turning off the PC every night is bad. The repair
and replacement costs far outweigh the savings.
Switching power supplies in PC's, being so
cheap don't take well to on/off cycles. Big
damage can occur.

Hibernate, is more productive. Just get a desktop pc that can do it right. I have seen too
many that just don't do it right.

Ever try to turn off a corporate-branded computer, what with all its encryption, big-brother tasks and god knows what else?

You may come in the morning and still find it "shutting-down".

I think they left out exactly how Vista is better at power saving.