“Microsoft says it is investigating reports of notebooks with poor battery life with Windows 7, as first reported by users on Microsoft TechNet. These users claim their batteries were working just fine under Windows XP and/or Windows Vista, and others are saying it occurs on their new Windows 7 PCs.”
The same thing happened to me last June when I installed the RC on a laptop. For about 6 months, my battery life (as XP reported it) would suddenly drop from 60% to 4 or 5% – then I’d still get another 45 minutes before the battery actually drained.
Windows 7, however, would automatically put the laptop into sleep mode when the battery reached 5% (I fiddled with the power management settings a little, but couldn’t find any way to change that). It was especially annoying the first that happened: while I was trying to watch a movie during a long bus trip.
Had the problem with Win7 final on an Asus EEE 1000HE. Yes yes, I know, Windows 7 is not officially supported on that netbook, yada yada yada. That’s still no reason for the battery life to be as awful as it was. The provided install of XP would yield about 7.5 to 8 hours of battery, my tweaked Ubuntu install could get up to 9. With 7, I would be lucky to get 6 out of it and the CPU was always running hotter than it should even once the ACPI drivers and Eeectl were working properly.
After replacing XP on my Dell XPS 1210 with Windows 7, my battery uptime raised from 4hours to 6hours under load.
So this current story is B.S.
wow really? or maybe you’re configuration isn’t affected? you know there quite a few different models out there.
Believe it or not, there are a lot more laptops out there than yours. Not every system was affected with battery issues. Apparently enough people have complained to Microsoft about it (I was one of them, yes) that they’re publically looking into it, hardly sounds like BS to me. Glad your having good battery life with it, the same can’t be said for every other configuration on the planet however.
no, you’re just a lucky bastard
win7 brought the runtime of my t400 from 5+ down to 4h
at the moment it’s my only problem with 7 (besides some old app not running anymore)
but i don’t know how much of this is because of the switch from 32 to 64bit