Engineers claim to have found way to squeeze extra life from Vista notebooks.
Dell’s blog site has some info about a new set of Vista battery optimisations that will supposedly wring extra life from notebooks.
Until we can test this we’ll take the news with a grain of salt, but it sounds promising. Dell is claiming improvements to the hibernation sleep states and multi-core power management, though there’s no stats on how this translates into battery life.
The post says the optimisations will be available in the next few weeks via support.dell.com, though it’s not clear yet what this will involve, or whether it’s been added to new notebooks (we’re waiting for Dell to get back to us).
Our biggest question is why now? Dell says the update is thanks to a new set of power management tools from Microsoft that allows it to finetune the OS to the hardware. The post reveals Dell has made 40 configuration changes.
While we’ve seen great battery life from Dell’s Latitude series, multimedia focused models could certainly do with some help. The XPS M1730 blitzed our performance benchmarks, but barely made 1hr 30 minutes under light use.