It seemed important for us to verify these claims by doing tests on the power consumption under both Vista and XP and to compare the impact of Luna and Aero respectively. We left the power management profile on Vista on “balanced”, as it is the one chosen by default, the one in XP was left in “portable computer”. The deactivation of graphic themes was done on both by choosing the “Windows classic” theme.

Age before beauty

One thing is immediately clear, as we predicted, (and contrary to Gateway’s results) Vista and XP are worlds apart when it comes to power consumption. Microsoft’s new OS lasts 28% less in tests. We now understand why certain laptop brands backtracked on the idea of only offering Vista after its market launch.

Of course, in the next couple of months drivers for Vista will be further optimised for power efficiency. This result should be reversed and Vista should take the upper hand. The manufacturers will, however, still have to build with SuperFetch.

This new function, which improves disk access, remains costly in terms of power (there’ll be more on this in the third article). It will be interesting to see Vista’s progression in this respect and more interesting still to compare it to the speed with which XP was optimised.

On the other hand, Microsoft gained a point in favour of Vista when they announced that Aero does not consume more than the 3D version. The interface follows the tradition of Luna which also didn’t have a significant impact on the over-all power consumption.

As we mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, Vista modifies the way in which the operating system manages the power consumption. For the average user, the most obvious change is the presence of three modes or profiles in the power supply options (instead of six in XP): “normal”, “power saving” and “high performance”. Note to editor: These two terms are in French and I’m not sure what they are in the English windows so this is only a translation not the actual name.