January 28th, 2006
Microsoft Driver Bug Severely Reduces Core Duo Notebook Battery Life
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Expecting longer battery life with your new Core Duo notebook? Don’t count on it yet. There appears to be a bug in a Microsoft driver that more than 25% off the battery life of a Napa-chipset-based notebook when a USB 2.0 device of any type is attached.
TG Daily has an interesting article today that goes into this issue in great detail; according to TG Daily:
“Our assessment and observations, coupled with extensive consultation with engineers familiar with Intel dual-core architecture, plus information we received today from Microsoft, have led us to conclude that an anomaly in the way the currently available version of the ICH7-M Southbridge communicates with Microsoft’s ACPI driver, is at the heart of the power drain issue.”
We Say: One of the selling points of the new CPUs is power consumption. According to the article, the issue has been known since at least 7/12/2005. Also according to the article, the fix “may be” as simple as a change to the registry. I’m not sure, quite honestly, why this issue is taking so long to fix, or why Intel has shipped with this problem. This will bear further watching.
Jeff Dickey says:
Why did Intel ship with this problem? I’d bet the rent that they were advised by Microsoft that “it’s only a small problem; a Registry fix will take care of it, and we’ll put that into the next Tuesday Patch Day patch set”. Come the Tuesday after Intel shipped, when no patch was evident, Microsoft likely told Intel (et al, by this point) that the fix was “more complex than originally thought” and would “require further study”. It would be interesting, if a tad catty, to ask whether similar problems have occurred on Core Duo systems using non-XP operating system. Another question that really should be asked is whether repairing this defect would improve battery life in earlier Pentium M processor systems, or whether the changes in the Core Duo are more than mere marketing.
January 31st, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Jacky says:
I think we can save battery life by applying this patch, see the article.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
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January 10th, 2008 at 8:29 am