Legit Reviews

I installed Vista as soon as I could on my HP dv2000t laptop.
Core Duo T2300E
1gb (Now 2Gb) ram
60Gb Hdd
Etc.

at first, HP only had one available "Driver" on their website and it was a BIOS update (Which I flashed against my better judgment) and vista began blue-screening. I reinstalled and it worked fine. It was using 742Mb of ram but looked really nice and blah blah blah.
Long story short, the audio would go out every time I put the laptop to sleep and would only be fixed by a reboot.

I reinstalled XP, but now i'm noticing (Wrongly or rightly) that my battery life in XP is not as good as it was in Vista. The question to be answered is "Does Vista have better power management than XP or is it something I am making up?" I'm considering going BACK to Vista although Visual Studio makes you run it with full administrative privileges which kind of makes me nervous.

What do you all think about Vista and battery life?

Everything i have read said Vista is WORSE at battery life. Something about it sets the wifi to max and always on or something, and of course all the new stuff in vista kills it too...aero glass!!

Mike

http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/ ... serva.html
http://news.com.com/Vista+beta+sucks+up ... 79215.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... e_more_bot

there are 3 articles - 1 is on the beta, but it hasnt changed ;)

Those are interesting articles, but they all use either the standard settings or no power settings at all. I just click on the icon in the taskbar and click power saving mode and I really do think my battery life was better. Obviously an OS with more eye-candy and features will require more power, but I don't think these articles gave it a fair chance.

Anyone else noticing battery differences between the two OS's?

I don't have Vista on my laptop, but PJ does...

I'm not sure who PJ is, but PJ do you mind changing your power setting to power save mode and see what you think. I really want to want to use vista because it is available to me and I like new things, even if they aren't the greatest thing ever...

PJ is a long time staff member and does all the motherboard reviews here on LR... He'll be on in the morning for sure.

I bought my wife a Dell Dimension 521e (found the deal at gotapex.com btw)
came with basic Vista, 1GB DDR2 Athlon X2 3800+ processor...

Well after the initial set up for Vista.... It ran like a dog. I thought I was running a Pentium II system to be honest. I decided to reformat the drive and put her other systems Home XP on it.

1 GB is inadequate to run Vista and I wasn't gonna spend another 100+ bucks for additional ram.

Edit: Oh not to mention that zonealarm pro cannot load and we couldn't print other than that, two thumbs up Microsoft!!!

Does switching to Windows Classic Mode in Vista free up any resources?

I'm not aware that that option is available, but given what I've already said... I'll be looking into Linux ;)