Ken Robertson's Blog

Ramblings of a .NET developer

Laptop Power Management and Operating Systems

Do different operating systems play a major role in a laptop's battery usage?

Monday I got my new-to-me IBM Thinkpad A22m and right away put Windows 2003 Server on it and set it up as a workstation.  I'd wanted to use Win2k3 because I had it on my desktop for a while and found it very stable, good memory management, and IIS6 right there.  Also, wanted it so my development environment is the same as my server's environment (no biggie though).

The battery on the not-so-new laptop has been not-so-hot.  The system is only 2 years old, but the battery hasn't been maintained too well and fully discharges in about 1.5 hours.  What I'm curious about is if the battery would perform better in WinXP Pro as opposed to Win2k3, even though I have all the APM drivers installed and setup.

Posted: Nov 12 2003, 12:53 PM by qgyen | with 1 comment(s)
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Comments

Tim Marman said:

Unless you're paging like crazy because of running Win2003 instead of XP, it should really make no difference.

Batteries do lose their charge over time though. I have an old ThinkPad that keeps about a 15 minute charge at this point (let's say, 4+ years old).
# November 19, 2003 12:58 PM
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