One of the knocks on Windows Vista was it was tough on laptop battery life. Windows 7, with its numerous efficiencies and improvement, was supposed to fix that. By and large, people feel it has, but there are now growing reports that in fact Windows 7 is draining batteries in record time. Small Business Computing gets to the bottom of it.
Microsoft officials confirmed Friday that they are looking into reports of radically shortened battery life on some laptops after installing Windows 7.
Although a few users reported similar problems during Windows 7’s beta test cycle last summer, particularly with some netbooks, wide availability of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) new OS following its October consumer release seems to have triggered significantly more cases.
“I upgraded my laptop from XP to Win 7 and my battery life went from about 2 hours to 30 minutes. The system shuts down (hibernates) without any warning. The powercfg-energy report shows the battery stored less than 40% of the Designed Capacity the last time the battery was fully charged,” one frustrated user, going by the screen name “dabruton,” said in a post on Microsoft’s TechNet user forums on Jan. 1.
“The battery life dropped to almost nothing after doing a clean install of windows 7 (it was fine before that, about 1.5-2 hours),” echoed another poster with the screen name “jw98029.”