Hi.

I reinstalled my laptop as a function of putting a much larger drive in it, and rather oddly windows 2000 (which I'm now using as I don't like XP) seems to have substantially better battery life than the XP pro the machine came with. Something like 30-40% better, in fact. Why??

pca

Odd - unless you tweaked the install to save power, or turn off other services. Plus, the new drive - does it use less power or have better characteristics?

Well, I tweaked both the XP original and the new 2000 install to save power, more or less identically. The new drive is an 80gb seagate, and it undoubtedly does have lower requirements than the 40gb toshiba that came out, but not to that extent. Strange.

pca

Algorithm? Given that this was Patrick involved, I thought a meter or other test gear was involved. It is possible that the code has changed. But then all the cute animation and graphics in the Fisher-Price OS might be drawing some extra power...

Newer drives are much more power efficient, though, so I think that might have a lot to do with it.

Hmm... turning off all the cutesy fade-in/out and animated menus that come standard in XP would also conserve power, not to mention make it faster. Anything that uses less CPU uses less power.

It seems to be pretty accurately reporting the true capacity. It died, or at least went into suspend mode, with about 10 minutes remaining on the meter. On a fresh battery it reported about 4.5 hours available, and I used it for at least 4 hours continuously, with wireless enabled and the screen up all the way. If I turn the wireless off and the brightness down it goes up to a shade under 6 hours, but it's more difficult to use the internet in the middle of a field like that

Under XP it normally reported around 3 and a bit hours, up to a little over 4 with no wireless and the brightness down all the way, and I would usually get about 85% of that in practice before it hibernated.

One thing it might be, I suppose, is different memory usage patterns. Ram is a real power hog and perhaps XP fiddles around in memory more than 2000? Or possibly the intel speedstep dynamic clock management is more efficient on 2000 with the separate application than the built-in one on XP. I'm not sure what the difference is caused by, but it seems to be real.

pca

The first thing I did when I got the thing last year was to turn it on, watch it boot, go 'urg' at the horrible fiddlyness of the GUI and spend the next hour tracking down and disabling every bit of eyecandy I could find. In the end it looked more or less identical to 2000, but in many respects didn't work as well. There are all sorts of things built into XP that get right up my nose, whereas I get along with 2000 about as well as a rational person can with a microsoft OS. I still spend at least half an hour a day actively hating it, but it's usable most of the time.

For instance, XP out of the box insists on opening ALL images with the build in browser, even if you install a third-party app and associate the filetypes with it. This is just broken. If I associate a application with a filetype, I damn well expect that application to run when the file is clicked on, not some other braindead program that has some hidden link to it.

Wireless connectivity is another pain in the arse under XP. It has a tendency to associate with access points on a semi-random basis, and often gets itself into a state where it refuses to connect to the local one in favour of attempting to connect to one it saw three months ago five hundred miles away. Or, if another AP comes on nearby with a stronger signal, the damn thing goes AHA! and connects to it, dumping the one it was currently using. Drives me nuts. 2000, while full of niggles in it's own right, seems to be mostly missing the gratuitious irritation factor of XP.

pca

The fix for the association is easy enough to do but fiddly to find. You have to right click on a file of the relevant type, choose 'open with', pick the appropriate application from the list, and tick 'alway open with this program'. This will fix the problem, but you have to do it with every damn filetype you want to use. With something like Acdsee, this is a lot of pratting about you shouldn't have to do.

As far as wireless goes pre-SP2 it was a major pain in the arse, after SP2 it's just an ordinary, everyday pain in the arse You can deal with it, but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to? 2000 just seems to do it better somehow.

The one thing I will admit that XP did better than 20000 is hibernate, but I can live with that if I get rid of all the other things it did worse.

pca